


young hearts

by teen_dean



Series: time has come today [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anguished Declarations of Love, Case Fic, Coming Out, Dark Watchers, Gnosticism, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Pre-Series Dean Winchester, References to Prostitution, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 52,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29587851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teen_dean/pseuds/teen_dean
Summary: He wasn't supposed to remember his visit to the future: helping with a case, facing his older self, meeting the angel he'll love. When 19yr-old Dean starts to recall what happened, he's desperate to claim the freedom and sanctuary that knowing his future provides. Teen-Dean is back with new Case-Fic-With-Feelings. This time, Sam is missing, and Teen-Dean calls on Past-Cas to help find him.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: time has come today [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2203566
Comments: 146
Kudos: 146
Collections: Fanfics_I_am_currently_reading(Jacquelyn_Winchester)





	1. what's past is prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I was never supposed to write anything more after [time has come today](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29112468/chapters/71464851) was posted, BUT I went and got attached to Teen-Dean. go figure. this story likely does not make sense if you haven't read the previous (but I won't tell you how to live). that said, I want to state for the record that this is a **follow-up** but not a **sequel** because I believe in my heart of hearts that _time has come today_ is precisely as self-contained as I wanted it to be. the problem is that I was weak, and I could not say goodbye to Teen-Dean. this fic, a spiritual younger sibling, is of course an abomination. yet for those who asked, here you have: The Continued Adventures of Young Dean

On the night of November the 12th, 1998, nineteen-year-old Dean left Schaffer’s bar with sixty-eight dollars in his pocket. He didn’t know how it got there, but he knew it wasn’t for nothing. He’d won ten bucks out of a game of pool earlier, and he had four dollars and eighty-two cents as leftover change in his pocket from indulging in a beer and fries at the bar. And then there was this unaccounted-for wad of bills folded in the shape of someone’s wallet.

If he didn’t know better, he’d say he lost time. That his brain got in the way and blocked out something too traumatic to face. He had ways of making money he didn’t like to think about directly, but he’d never had the good fortune to be able to forget about them before.

But there was no inexplicable gap in his evening. There was no dirtiness or discomfort about his person. There was just money in his shirt like someone had pick-pocketed him in reverse. Maybe someone took pity on him? But for all he faced monsters and ghosts on the regular, the idea of anything about himself provoking random compassion stretched beyond what he was capable of believing.

He unlocked the door of the motel, quiet as possible. Sam woke up, too well-trained not to, but he also knew that Dean’s unhurried and familiar tread brokered no urgency or danger. Sam didn’t say anything, just shifted and tried to get back to sleep. That was good. He had school tomorrow.

Dean put his money in an empty tin, hid the tin underneath the mattress, and got ready for bed. He’d buy food first. Then he’d pay down enough of the motel bill to smooth over their stay, but no more. John would be back soon, hopefully, and could settle the rest on his return. If he couldn’t? Well, Dean would worry about that when it came up.

It was an earlier night than he’d expected for himself, but he was bone-tired. After brushing his teeth, he crawled beneath the scratchy motel blankets and fell to sleep at once.

He dreamt of blue eyes.

The next day he saw Sam off to school, answered a call from his father—John didn’t leave him room to speak, only reported in to say he was still alive and hung up—then he hopped on the back of the city bus to avoid the fare and took himself to the supermarket. He bought discount bread and peanut butter, beans, dry pasta noodles, and the cheapest tomato sauce available. The problem these days was Sam’s appetite, and his own. Given half the chance, they could smash this entire bag of bread, spreading peanut butter over it one slice at a time, and still have a hole left in the bottom of their stomachs.

Part of the problem was that motels didn’t leave you with many options for storing food. Frozen meals or fresh dairy were rarely an option. Saving a few cents by buying something in bulk was out of the offering too. Not to mention dishes, cookware, and the fact there was almost never more than a microwave or a hotplate for cooking on.

Dean didn’t need anything fancy in life. He had a flash of an image in his head, a kitchen with old 50s appliances, a fridge with multiple doors to it, countertops for chopping food. That would suit him. Strange that he should picture an old-fashioned, industrial kitchen instead of one like he’d known in his childhood home, but he supposed it just went to show how very distant he was from a normal, apple-pie life.

He intended to get to work on his final Math course when he made it back to the motel, but he felt exhausted in a way he couldn’t account for. John wasn’t here. John wouldn’t know if he took twenty minutes to nap. He fell onto the bed fully-clothed and above the blankets.

He dreamt of a town in the mountains. He dreamt of the monstrous wings of a deadly creature. Black talons and a gruesome beak. He woke with the phantom pain of a slice across his stomach. A strangely displaced pain, as he’d only seen it. It hadn’t happened to him.

Of course it hadn’t happened to him, it was a dream.

He woke up at odds, disoriented. He didn’t generally give much credence to dreams. You didn’t talk about them, in the life. You kept your nightmares to yourself. Like every torment, a man must bear it alone. Dean lay back against the pillows and rubbed a hand over his face. He felt the uncanny disassociation of déjà vu, like his mind lagged half a second behind itself and created an infinite loop of time that was neither real nor escapable.

He had to stay busy and get his mind off this. He met Sam at school at the end of the day and took him to Goodwill, and for twelve dollars they had new shoes for Sam, some more clothes, all practical layers. “You gotta stop growing, Sammy,” said Dean. “You’ll turn into a full-on sasquatch if you keep this up.” Dean wasn’t ready to start looking up at Sam. He needed time to get used to it.

He didn’t dread sleep. He felt with it a strange longing to go somewhere, to exist somewhere else. He couldn’t wrap words around the feeling.

He dreamt of a saloon-meets-sports bar, hazily sitting at a table littered with beer bottles and whiskey glasses. Across from him a man laughed, the corners of his eyes crinkled. Dean couldn’t fully see his face, but he thought _brotherfatherfriend_ and knew this man cared for him somehow. It was a given and it was unconditional. Why he should, Dean couldn’t fathom.

He woke briefly, was pulled under again. This time walking through the moonlit mountain town, looking at the stars through his breath misting in the cold. He walked beside a man, his sleeve brushing against a tan trench coat. Blue eyes that looked at Dean, looked into Dean. Saw everything and loved everything. In the dream he understood it with such impossible clarity. It had always been love.

He woke up in the pre-dawn, head spinning, thinking he’d be sick. He got up and he showered, military-brief despite the weak water pressure of the motel. He took a walk, hair still damp, ostensibly to outpace his thoughts, but perhaps more deeply to use the cool morning to try and recapture that sense of brisk mountain air in his lungs.

When he got back, Sam was up. Dad had called, expected to be gone another week at least. Sam didn’t have to say out loud that John was pissed Dean wasn’t around to take it. The implication was there.

It was too late to change, so Dean wouldn’t address that anger until it arrived. Maybe if the hunt went well, if Dad was in a good mood, if Dean could rustle up a bottle of Johnny Walker to have at the ready, maybe then John would forget to be pissed. You never knew what was just a hiccup and what was a hanging crime.

Dean made them oatmeal for breakfast, stirring in peanut butter in the hopes that it would fill them up more and stave off hunger until lunch. He still had some money left and had scouted out a place with a real cheap soup and sandwich deal, free coffee on the side. He didn’t mention his lunch plan to Sam, because it would be a nice surprise, and besides, knowing about it would make waiting a torture. Dean couldn’t stop thinking about sinking his teeth into a real chicken sandwich, even as he scraped the last grain of oatmeal out of his bowl.

“We’ll go to the library today,” said Dean. Saturday, and Sam had been anguishing about how much work the new school assigned. They needed to get out of the motel room. Dean ought to work too, but he couldn’t focus. When they arrived, he sent Sam to the upstairs of the branch—a place with neutral white walls and grey carpet but large windows that let all the golden light in—meanwhile he surreptitiously glanced at the library brochure. No cost for a card, here, and they’d make one for anybody with a state address, local or not. Dean passed over a fake ID and scrawled his signature on the blue paper card they issued to him.

A word came into mind. He didn’t know if he was insane for thinking it. But he spoke before he could stop himself. “Do you have anything on griffins?”

The librarian, a Black woman named Essie with very short curly hair, looked up from her filing. “Griffins?”

“Yeah,” Dean said uncertainly. “Griffins.”

“Our fantasy section is upstairs—”

“No, I wasn’t thinking of that. I wanted the history. It’s— never mind.” He didn’t even know why he wanted to look up griffins. It was a stupid thing. The history? The lore? There likely wasn’t any. They were a made-up story.

“Well in that case, there might be something in our adult nonfiction. Let’s take a little look.” She came around from the desk, beckoning Dean to follow her to the wooden card catalogue.

She pulled out the subject drawer under ‘G’, flipping through the cards expertly. “Griffins are Greek, I believe?” she said. “You might look under ‘chimera’ as well, or even ‘manticore.’ Here’s one that might do…” She stopped at one of the index cards, then took a scrap of paper from the top of the catalogue and jotted down a call number and the brief title of a book in very tidy writing. She followed this with some additional numbers set to neat bullet points. “Greek fiction and epics are under 883, but look around that section. Some of it might be under Greek Mythology in the 290s, too.”

“You’re really good at this,” Dean said. He briefly considered what it would be like to have a librarian as a hunter. He took them for meek and bookish, but they seemed to know _everything_ and he had a feeling that they were just a hair away from turning lethal at any time. Just imagine how much further along monster-hunting could be if someone like Essie had a go at organizing Bobby’s collection of arcane works.

“Aren’t you sweet as sugar?” laughed Essie. “The nonfiction is upstairs, in the old Carnegie side. You just let me know if you want any more help.”

Dean went up and wandered into the stacks, floor creaking under him as his steps troubled the heavy shelves. He quickly found the first book that Essie recommended. He felt stupid flipping through the pages because John would laugh him out of the room if he knew Dean was looking up griffins in the same way they did research for a hunt. He’d never heard a hunter utter the word, and couldn’t explain his certainty that he should be looking into this.

He also couldn’t explain why the first three paragraphs he read felt wrong somehow. Written by some academic who didn’t take it seriously. They didn’t get the facts right. But then the fourth paragraph mentioned the Arimaspians and something in him shuddered. He closed the book, held it to his body for a moment as he waited for the dizzy feeling to pass. He drifted down the row between the shelves and sat in one of the tall windows and went back to the book.

He ransacked the rest of the section when he was done, but never found much. Certainly nothing that gave him that overwhelmed feeling from before. He poked around a little more here and there, then gave it up. He left the nonfiction section to find Sam at a work table on the other side of the library between the magazines and the adult fiction, a newer part that looked down to the town’s main street on one side, and to a park on the other.

“How’s the essay?” he asked.

“Pretty much done,” Sam said with a sigh, still flipping over the lined, hand-written pages. “But I should have put those two paragraphs here instead, so I’ll have to rewrite the last half.”

It was that kind of academic fussiness that would get this kid into Stanford, Dean thought.

Though why the hell should anyone think a Winchester would go to college? It was almost a laugh that Dean’s mind even summoned it up, except for the part where it wasn’t a very good joke.

“They gave me a library card,” said Dean, fishing the blue paper out of his pocket to show Sam the proof. “You can take out some books and bring them back to the motel, if you want.”

“You serious?” Sam said. He was up like a shot, packing his pencils and binders into his backpack.

“Calm down, you big nerd,” said Dean. “You’d think I just bought you a lap dance.”

“Shut up, Dean,” said Sam. He didn’t have the time for a fight, though, because he was immediately off to find as many books as he could carry out.

This left Dean a few moments. He flipped through a new car magazine, letting his eyes glance over brief snippets of articles and photographs till he made it to the end and replaced it on the shelf. The other magazines didn’t grab his attention, apart from the food ones, but those he couldn’t let himself look at. They’d only make him hungry.

He might check out the sci-fi section, or the Westerns. He paused at the end of one shelf along the way. The slatwall end-cap propped up a few featured books. One caught his eye in particular. The cover was a painting of a winter scene, a river winding through the centre, mountains in the background, and a saddled horse. It had that almost sentimental quality of many old cowboy paintings and paperback Western covers, but something elevated it. _Close Range: Wyoming Stories_.

He picked it up to page through. There were pictures inside at the start of each chapter—each short story, rather. Coloured artwork on that thick, photo paper. The cover said the author won a Pulitzer, which was pretty highfalutin, but these were short stories about cowboys and Dean wasn’t an idiot when it came to reading. If he liked it, he liked it. Cormac McCarthy wasn’t a dummy, and Dean had actively _chosen_ to ride in the backseat of the Impala so that he could stretch out and believe he was in his own world as he read _All the Pretty Horses_.

He decided he’d check it out. There was something about wintry Wyoming he just couldn’t get over. Downstairs, at the circulation desk, he assured Essie she’d been helpful with the griffins. Sam looked at him strangely, but didn’t ask questions in front of the librarian.

They had to stay around the motel that night because John said he would call, had some work for Dean to look into. Sam read his dorky books and Dean put his headphones on and slipped a Bob Dylan tape into his walkman. The walkman was given to Dean by John just before he left two weeks ago. Dean thought it was a gift, and it was in its way, but John said he wanted to see it transformed into a working EMF-reader by the time he came back. Dean had not yet had the wherewithal to take it apart, even though he knew he should.

He watched the cassette tape reels move in tandem through the window of the walkman, one side gradually giving up its ribbon to feed the other as Bob Dylan chanted his way through “Ballad of a Thin Man.” The song felt different today, of all days, as Dean closed his eyes and listened.

_Because something is happening here / and you don’t know what it is._

Blue eyes that loved him so much, so much that he felt like he was drowning, that he was buffeted on all sides by a tidal wave of immense power, immense cold. Drowning under snow, moving faster than falling, emerging from the crisp white surface and gasping for breath like a man tossed overboard. He put his lips to the emergency whistle attached to his coat and it sounded like a siren—

He jerked awake at the table. Red and blue lights flashed through the motel curtains in a journey across the room, then disappeared down the road.

He pulled his headphones down around his neck and turned the walkman over in his hands. It was all connected somehow, that was a feeling he couldn’t shake. And it had all happened. It had all happened even though it wasn’t at all possible. It was like he had another person’s memories in him.

“Hey Sammy,” he said. He wet his lips, spoke before he could stop himself. “You ever have weird dreams?”

“No.” The answer came quick, almost too quick.

“I didn’t mean dirty dreams, you old prude,” said Dean.

Sam sighed, closing his book with a thumb to mark the page and looking over from his bed. “Does this have something to do with you researching griffins?”

“Maybe,” said Dean. He played with the buttons on the walkman, pressing ‘Eject’ just for the sake of having the catch release, the cassette compartment ease down into his palm, only for him to snap it fleetly closed again and restart the cycle. “I’ve been having this dream about fighting a griffin. In Wyoming.” It was weird that talking about it made him remember more of it. More than he recalled on waking up. “I went into this cave and I had to kill it for… something.” He remembered the machete driving into the bulk of the griffin, the weight of it on him. He didn’t remember what he was after. That wasn’t the important part, for him. That was somebody else’s focus.

Sam was good enough not to snark at him for it, not immediately dismiss it. That was probably more than Dean deserved for confessing to such a stupid dream. “I’ve never heard of griffins being out there in the world,” said Sam. “Dad’s never mentioned them.”

“And he’d know, wouldn’t he?” said Dean. John was a great hunter. If he hadn’t heard of them, there wasn’t much chance they existed.

“Yeah,” Sam said, noncommittal. He thumbed at the pages of his book. “Maybe you just saw something on TV,” he said. “It probably came up on one of those dumb Sunday shows like _Xena_ or _Hercules_.”

Dean would not call _Xena: Warrior Princess_ a guilty pleasure, per se, except that it was a pleasure and he was guilty about it, but also, no. No one could say Lucy Lawless didn’t have an overwhelmingly sexy, brawny appeal.

Thinking of Lucy Lawless’ angular face, dark hair, and intensely blue eyes, though. That felt suddenly different, too.

That part he couldn’t tell Sam about.

Instead he said, “Hercules never visited Wyoming.” He turned the walkman over in his hands again. Press eject. Ease open. Snap close.

Sam didn’t offer up any other ideas, but how could he? It was a barely formed notion in Dean’s own head. Finally Sam said, “You gonna ask Dad about it?”

“Nah,” said Dean. He wouldn’t waste John’s time. John would think he was being an idiot, or else he would get the wrong kind of concerned about Dean being possessed or under the influence of a hex bag or something.

He should check for hex bags, maybe. His uneasiness just didn’t feel natural.

When night fell, he didn’t know whether he longed for sleep or dreaded it. He didn’t like this griffin because it didn’t fit in the world as he knew it and answers weren’t coming easy. But then there was that feeling, one he wasn’t used to. That radiating acceptance and love. From outside of him, and, more unfamiliar, from inside him as well. He let himself be loved. Now he wanted it, hungry for the feeling and aching to let himself have it again, he just didn’t know how.

Fraught, it took him hours to finally catch sleep overtaking him.

It was Sam but Sam was older, taller, hair longer. Meeting him in a hug to say how relieved they were to find him alive. Someone else who said, _I’m proud of you_. Said, _You were pure enough after all._

And the blue-eyed, dark-haired angel. Standing before a jukebox; sitting up half-rumpled in bed; telling him over late-night books and early-morning breakfast jaunts about love, about family, about Dean. Telling him in a million little ways that he loved Dean, any and every Dean, that he’d forgive and protect and wait for him.

The warm weight of that trench coat over his body, and his cheek pillowed against a broad shoulder. The earnest and assured promise, _I would never let anything happen to you._

He felt it bone-deep, and he sat up in his bed in the night and said, “Castiel!”

Sam stirred in the next bed, snapping Dean out of the spell. Asked if something was wrong. Dean said it was nothing, and Sam rolled over and went back to sleep.

Dean lay down with a pounding heart. He put his hand over his chest to feel it through his fingertips, through his palm. He remembered… He couldn’t say if it was everything, but it was so much. He’d gone to the future, and, that’s right, they needed him to kill a griffin. First-born, coming of age. That had been important.

He met his older self there. Hardened, closed-off. Until they broke through to one another, appreciated one another. His older self had been a good fighter, a natural protector, and that would be him someday. He would go through Hell before he got there, but there were no two ways around it. Dean didn’t even know what choices would lead him there, and whether if, in trying to avoid them, he’d only make them again. He should’ve asked more questions. But perhaps it was best he didn’t.

He hadn’t wanted to leave. He remembered that feeling. That Sam and Dean and Cas treated him like a brother or a son, but in the way one should be treated. Dean didn’t remember the last time John hugged him. But Sam and Cas and even Dean, they did it like they knew he needed it, even though it would never occur to him to ask. He would’ve stayed just a little longer if he could.

He didn’t sleep the rest of the night. He relived everything he could, digging for more, aching to remember what it felt like when they didn’t just need him, they trusted him. When they laughed with him—at the bar with Dean, Sam with his terrible Ohio roadmap gift-wrap, even Castiel’s sardonic humour, subtle but charming. He wanted to know what happened to them. If Dean ever got up the nerve to tell Cas how he felt, if Sam managed the deal with the Arimaspians, if they got to Eileen in time.

Cas thanked him before he left. Expressly. Knew it wouldn’t matter because Dean wouldn’t remember and did it anyways so that he could hear it once. He could’ve just not. Dean wasn’t supposed to recall any of this. But now he did and he thought of the way that Cas held him outside Schaffer’s bar.

In the early hours of the morning a thought struck him. He could pray. Wherever he was, Castiel would hear.

 _Cas_ , he thought. He had no experience with prayer. He didn’t know if he was doing this right, if it would even work. He intertwined his fingers on his chest, closed his eyes. _Castiel_ , he thought. _It’s me, Dean Winchester. I want to talk to you. I need to talk to you. Can you hear me? God, I hope you can hear me. I feel like I’m going crazy and I don’t think I should feel this way, but I just gotta see you again because you’re the only one who could understand. Are you there, Cas? It’s me, Dean. It’s me, Dean._

He waited, attentive to every stir around him. But Cas never appeared.

It was Sunday night that Cas turned up. Dean sat on the back end of a beat-up car on the edge of Bobby’s lot on one of those blistering warm summer days. Cas stepped through a row of scrap-metal cars, looking around at the scene as if to take in every detail. The last thing his eyes landed on was Dean, now only a few feet away.

Dean smiled, body relaxing. He’d been keyed up for ages, and here was Cas. He’d have to explain that he remembered it all, even though he wasn’t supposed to, and that he wanted to keep remembering. He wanted to talk about it with someone, anyone, and Cas was the very best for it.

“You found me,” Dean said.

“You called for me,” said Castiel. “Why?”

“I needed to talk,” said Dean.

Cas gave a small nod of his head, gesturing him to go on.

“I remember everything,” said Dean.

“Remember what?” said Cas.

“The mission, Cas,” said Dean. “Meeting you, meeting me.”

“We’ve never met,” said Castiel.

“I just told you,” said Dean. “I remember it all. You don’t have to play. It’s not your fault it didn’t take, man. Actually, it’s a gift to remember.”

“I don’t understand,” said Cas.

Dean furrowed his brow. Cas wasn’t a great liar, he hadn’t even had to know him long to know that much. Which meant he genuinely didn’t understand. Had he erased his own memory of Dean? Or…

He looked just the same. Same lines on his face, same trench coat.

Dean looked around himself. He wasn’t at Bobby’s. It wasn’t the middle of summer. “This is a dream,” said Dean.

“Yes,” said Cas.

“I’m just making this up.”

“No,” said Cas. “Not quite.” He looked down at his arms, at his body. “You’ve given me a comprehensible form, though I don’t know what attachment you might have to this figure. A friend? Father?”

“No,” said Dean, voice breaking. “You.” He swallowed hard, stood up, arms folded tightly over his stomach as he paced a few steps closer. He wanted to be in his orbit. He wanted to look Cas in the eye and see if he could find some trace of the one he knew. “But you haven’t met me yet.”

Cas angled his head curiously to one side, eyes gently narrowing. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Dean Winchester. We know each other, in the future. Quite a few years from now.”

“Quite a few by your reckoning, perhaps,” said Castiel.

“You haven’t heard of me? You said I was part of a plan.”

“I haven’t,” Cas said stiffly, shoulders straightening and jaw jutting out. “It is therefore not important for me to know your name, yet.”

“That’s alright,” said Dean, looking away. “It’s a bummer, though. I was hoping to talk to you-from-the-future. I want to go there, for a visit.”

“That is not possible. If you were needed there, the powers that be would issue that interval of me, or some other angel, the command to fetch you. They would not do something so monumental just for a social visit. I am surprised they issued the initial order at all.”

“They didn’t,” said Dean. “We came up with it between us. Future you, future me, and Sam.”

“You’re mistaken,” Castiel said, a politely delivered correction.

 _Cas is a bit… fallen_ , Sam said to him once. But it wasn’t until he met Dean. It wasn’t until he raised him from Hell. This Cas wasn’t a rule-breaker. Dean looked down at the dirt between their feet. He stood close, but Cas didn’t seem to mind. Maybe didn’t know better, where personal space was concerned. Or maybe didn’t care, acting out of the persistent, humming draw Dean felt towards him.

“I’m not, but that’s okay,” said Dean. He didn’t know why he kept saying it was alright. Perhaps it was only that he knew it had been hopeless from the beginning. He had no desire to distress Cas or make him feel poorly. It wasn’t Castiel’s fault he didn’t know any better. “You’re saying there’s no way to take me there? Just to let Cas know I know? Future you, I mean.”

Cas’ lips pressed into a line, thinking hard. “It’s difficult to know how to explain in a way you’d understand. If I were so commanded, I could take you to the past, but not to the future. My future self, whatever he is, can travel here, but not beyond his own time.”

“Right,” said Dean. “But you _can_ go forward again, after going back. Right? He did make it back, didn’t he?”

“We can return to the present as we know it,” said Cas. “Listen, Dean.” And he paused, lips parting, as if he were in turn listening to something. “There is no ‘time,’ there is only ‘change.’ In fact, change is everything we measure. I can perceive the past, but I cannot perceive future changes that I have not experienced.”

Dean gave a slow nod of his head.

“It’s due to the natural entropy of the world,” said Cas, as if that would tidy things up.

“The what?”

“You think of time as something that happens on the face of a watch, one second ticking by after the other in an orderly fashion. To move to the future, you would merely adjust the minute-hand forward. To move to the past, you would move the minute-hand back. But the watch does not _own_ time, the watch merely represents a record of change. It is a fantasy of the order of time.

“Now. Imagine a new deck of cards in perfect order, grouped according to number and suit. I shuffle the cards once. They are no longer in order. This is entropy. They aren’t—I want to say this clearly—they aren’t chaotic or diminished. If you were to look at them, perhaps you would find a new pattern. By some accident I may shuffle them to alternate red-and-black, the respective card-values irrelevant. Or some pattern more difficult to perceive. Any order is order. The change in the order of the cards is perfectly measurable once it’s happened, but it is not predictable. I could shuffle again, and again, and again, with new patterns emerging in each instance.

“Time is not a place you can go, but a previous order of the world _is_. As an angel, I can recall the past patterns I’ve witnessed, and could return to the point at which the deck followed that particular order. But every moment, including this one, shuffles the deck into a new order that I don’t yet know.”

“Damn,” said Dean, giving it all a moment to sink in. “Does Heaven really see the universe as a pack of cards? Must be a pretty big deck.”

“The universe has existed for 13.7 billion years,” said Cas. “I’d say there are more than 52.” Dean took it for a joke and chuckled at it, but Cas didn’t smile. He observed Dean’s reaction with curiosity, though. “I don’t know much about card games,” Cas confessed, leaning in a little. “I’m listening in on a conversation in an Italian pizzeria between a physics professor and one of his PhD students.”

“I have another question,” said Dean. “Am I changing the future by talking to you? By remembering the things I wasn’t supposed to?”

“If we were to continue the metaphor, I think you’d be called a wildcard,” said Cas. “And you’ve brought me into it, too.” Cas looked away, lips pursed. “It _must_ be part of God’s plan,” he said. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

“Future Cas would know,” said Dean.

This clearly annoyed Cas. Dean remembered the feeling. Meeting another version of yourself was extraordinarily unpleasant. Dean had been soundly beaten in a sparring match by his older self and still held it against… himself.

“Is there any way to talk to him?” Dean asked.

“I cannot help you,” said Cas. Dean looked at his shoes again, not knowing why he’d hoped that this Cas might have a soft spot for him. “Although,” Cas said, as if to merely finish the train of thought, “it has certainly been achieved by humans before and left as a matter of record in their safehouses and bunkers.”

Of course, the Men of Letters bunker. Sam and Dean had been surrounded by spells and objects of power. They said there were other chapterhouses too, not just in Kansas. Others more penetrable than the safely-guarded bunker.

He found Cas watching him closely. “But you understand that there is nothing _I_ can do,” said Cas.

“I understand.”

“I should go,” said Cas.

“Will I see you again?” Dean asked.

“Will you pray for me again?” said Cas.

“If it wouldn’t offend you,” said Dean.

Cas’ gaze dropped. “It has been a long time since someone has prayed to me directly,” he said. “I thought mankind had forgotten.”

“Oh, angel,” said Dean. “I could never forget about you.”

Because the universe had a sense of humour, the radio woke him up with, of all songs, P.P. Arnold singing “Angel of the Morning.” He groaned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » yes, I pushed ahead the publication date of Annie Proulx's _Close Range: Wyoming Stories_ by approximately 6 months because it served my purposes, and I will not apologise  
> » the card deck entropy analogy is taken from Carlo Rovelli's _The Order of Time_ (who I heartily recommend if you like being charmed and occasionally upset about general relativity or How Time Happens), and "There is no time, there is only change: in fact, change is everything we measure!" must be imagined in the cheerful voice of Francesca Vidotto, as presented at that one spacetime conference I attended  
> » I did not mean to spend so much time in 1998 and accidentally turn this into a period piece  
> » ch. 1 title reference: _The Tempest_ II.i by William Shakespeare


	2. time held me green and dying

Dean returned to the library enough times that week that by Wednesday he no longer needed Essie’s help to sign on to the clunky library computers and connect to the Web. On Thursday, he hotwired a car after seeing Sam off to school and broke into an abandoned Men of Letters chapterhouse halfway across the state. There were many things he could have poached as useful plunder, but he took only the books he thought might help him. He ditched the car at the edge of town, wiping it clean of his prints, and made it to back to the motel before Sam could know he’d been gone.

Saturday morning John called: he’d be back later that day. Dean answered with a crisp, “Yessir,” and after hanging up he immediately phoned Bobby.

“Hey, Bobby, it’s Dean.”

“How’re you, Dean? How’s Sam?”

“We’re good,” said Dean. Bobby’s innocuous-seeming questions cut to the quick. If there was something to worry about, if it had anything to do with Sam, Dean wouldn’t hedge. Dean was wise enough now to see it for a hunter’s shorthand, the fastest way of knowing this wasn’t a crisis. “I got a favour to ask, Bobby.”

“That so?”

“I need you to call me in on a job.”

“What job?”

“Any job,” said Dean.

“I don’t have anything for you, but if you want to come and stay—”

“No,” said Dean. “I mean I need you to call my dad tonight and tell him you need my help.”

“Something going on between you two?”

“I just need the excuse,” said Dean.

“You’re a grown man, Dean,” said Bobby. “If you want to strike out on your own, you’re allowed to.”

“You know it’s not like that,” said Dean, wishing Bobby didn’t make him say it. John needed Dean. He needed someone who would follow orders. He needed someone to look after Sam. And he needed to know Dean wouldn’t vanish one day like Mary did. So Dean, nineteen and a man, needed his dad’s permission to leave. He couldn’t tell John what he was really doing, and John would see through almost any lie Dean tried to tell. He had to do it this way.

“I don’t want him to get upset,” said Dean. “Or try to get involved. And I want him to stay put, here. Sammy likes his new school.”

“What kind of a job?” said Bobby, though he was no longer rebutting Dean. He was conspiring. “What could I need _your_ expertise for before someone like Rufus or John himself?”

“I don’t mind. Anything,” said Dean. It was true that he was a young hunter, that there weren’t many things he alone could do. He was a grunt, some muscle at best, but anyone else close by could be that and better. “Tell him I’m bait. Something that’s picking off firstborns under twenty-one.”

“Boy, I don’t want to know why that came to mind so quick.”

“It’ll work,” said Dean.

“I know it will work,” said Bobby. Dean caught the implicit condemnation. He couldn’t dwell on that, though. John and Bobby could be at odds about the strangest things, and Bobby just didn’t understand that sometimes Dean was best put to use drawing fire. He was an idealist in that regard, where John was a realist. Dean couldn’t give it too much credence.

“We can fine-tune it later, if I need more time,” said Dean.

“So where will you really be?” Bobby asked.

Dean hadn’t expected that. “In Sioux Falls,” he said. “With you.”

“I thought you wanted me for a decoy,” said Bobby. “Thought maybe you had some girl you wanted to see.”

“No, Bobby,” said Dean. “I need your help. I’m in over my head with a few things.”

“Sounds serious,” said Bobby.

“You have no idea,” said Dean. “Thanks, Bobby. You’ll call him? Any time after seven.”

“I’ll call,” said Bobby. “John owes me one for that time outside of Phoenix.”

“I’ll owe you one, Bobby.”

“Don’t you worry about that, son,” Bobby said. “Least not until you get here and tell me what’s really going on.”  


* * *

  
John came back from Minnesota in a good mood, which eased some of Dean’s guilt in leaving Sam with him alone for the week. When the motel phone rang at eight o'clock, Dean had to pretend not to be too interested, letting John take it while Dean cleaned his guns. They bickered a bit at first. It figured that John would find a flaw in Bobby’s plan, a way to argue just for the sake of butting heads and come away feeling righteous, but he ultimately didn’t get in the way. Even asked Dean if he wanted to go before he verbally shook on it with Bobby.

The upside of the subterfuge was that John bought Dean a Greyhound ticket to get to Sioux Falls. Dean’s Men of Letters books were already packed along the bottom of his duffel, easy to cover over with the rest of his clothes folded military-neat, ready to go.

He spent most of the bus ride staring out the window, bored and ponderous. He forgot the library book he borrowed back at the motel, not having read more than a few of the short stories within. Meanwhile the Men of Letters books would attract too much attention for him to pull out here. Not, he mused, that they would be the strangest thing the interior of a Greyhound had seen.

He’d never asked about Bobby, in the future. He assumed Bobby was doing the same thing as ever in 2020—a little antisocial, a little drunk, but an expert you could always go to. Hell, the others probably phoned him up for ideas before they resorted to collecting Dean from 1998. Still, he should’ve asked while he was there, maybe even called. It would have been a nice tether, to hear Bobby’s voice in the future.

He hitched from the bus stop in town to the end of Bobby’s road. The long bus ride and now this plodding walk through a misty November evening left him too much time to think, too much time dwelling in that sense of loss. It seemed odd to call it nostalgia, stranger still to call it anything like homesickness. Even if it settled in his chest and stomach with the same kind of impalpable yearning. It didn’t feel normal to crave the future this badly, to crave a life he’d never been meant to witness.

By the time he made it to Bobby’s front door, he had perspiration on his forehead despite the cool weather and needed a break from bearing the uneven weight of his duffel.

Bobby opened the door, looking him over. “Well, better come inside,” he said.

The place looked like it always did—shitty wallpaper, a few empty bottles, a general mess of books and papers. Dean set down his bag by the couch, where he presumed he’d be sleeping while he was here. “Thanks, Bobby,” he said, wearily rubbing a hand over his face. He needed to get himself together.

“What’s eating you up?” Bobby asked.

“I wish I knew how to say,” said Dean.

“Sit, for starters,” said Bobby. He left for the kitchen, came back with a cup of old, hot coffee. Had the smell of battery acid, like it had been sitting on the burner for hours. Not unlike (Dean thought almost fondly) the coffee that Sam made in the bunker years from now.

“Look like you could use it,” Bobby said.

“Probably right,” said Dean. He wrapped his hands around the cup. He hadn’t realised they were cold. He hadn’t realised how bare and vulnerable he felt right now. Everything was suddenly close to the surface.

“Said you were in over your head?” Bobby asked.

Dean nodded. His nose felt runny from coming inside after walking in the rapidly cooling evening of a South Dakota November.

“Not something you could tell John about?” Bobby prompted.

Dean shook his head. How to begin explaining? He raised his cup of coffee to his mouth, burned his tongue for it, and swallowed hard. He had to stop thinking about all the messy things: the sense of belonging, of acceptance, of _sanctuary_ he felt when he thought about his time in the future. He needed to streamline it, get to the basics of why he was here.

“Take your time,” said Bobby.

“Yeah,” said Dean. And maybe there was a small slice of that patience and comfort to be found here, too, even if it was wrapped up in the form of a crusty, unshaven old hunter. “Yeah, okay. I just don’t know what you’ll make of it, Bobby.”

“Try me,” he said.

“I went through something recently,” said Dean. He couldn’t look up from his coffee. “Just— just listen and let me get it all out, then I’ll—” he sniffed once more. “Then I’ll take questions from the class.” He tried one more sip of coffee, a little more bearable in temperature, now, even if the taste hadn’t improved.

“About a week ago, I was at this bar,” he said. “And a man shows up. Asks to talk to me. He says his name is Castiel, and he’s from the future. The honest-to-god future, Bobby.” Dean looked up, glass-green eyes still reflecting his wonder at the awesomeness of it all. “He said he was my friend, decades from now, and he took me there, all the way to 2020.”

Bobby looked like he wanted to speak, shifting forward in his chair and opening his mouth to interrupt, but he remembered Dean’s request not to speak in time to stop himself.

“They needed my help to kill a griffin up in the mountains, and somehow—” He shook his head in disbelief, still a little surprised at his own success. “I did it. We did it. Sam and me and Cas—and by ‘me’ I mean ‘him,’ Future-Me. And along the way, Bobby, we fought with demons, and there are angels. There are _angels_. Cas is one. And I know the path to the future ain’t easy, but there was something about being there, seeing it like I did, I never felt so free.”

Bobby nodded his head slowly. Dean couldn’t fault him for looking doubtful.

“I have some proof of it,” said Dean. “There’s this old society called the Men of Letters that they know about in the future. When I asked Castiel about it—this was just a few nights ago, in our time—he told me I oughtta check out a chapterhouse and find their books on time travel, which I did, and I brought them with me.” He gave a nod toward his duffel. “I know what I’m saying sounds crazy to you, but the proof is in those books if you need to see it for yourself.”

Bobby glanced at Dean’s bag, but he didn’t ask to see the books at once. The promise of them already started to tip things in favour of believing Dean’s wild experience.

“Griffins and time travel and angels,” said Bobby. He leaned back and scratched abstractedly at his beard. “Not what I thought you were here to say.”

“What did you think?” Dean asked.

“Something normal, for starters,” said Bobby. “But something big and serious and confusing that would upset John? Thought maybe you'd say you're quitting hunting. Or that you were queer.”

Dean gave a rough laugh. He was too far gone to take this well. He faced Bobby with a devil-may-care smile and glassy eyes. “Well,” he said. “That too.”

He bent his head forward and wept into his hand. Cried into his coffee, which Bobby prised away to keep from spilling over. And Bobby put a hand on his shoulder and said, “That’s okay, son,” even though it didn’t stop Dean from crying.

And he wasn’t really upset, it was just such a release. He hadn’t realised it at the time, when he came out to Sam by accident in the future under the assumption that it was a known fact. He hadn’t realised how gratifying it was to have Sam’s acceptance. Knowing Sam _would_ react like that one day had made Dean consider saying it aloud half a dozen times over the past week. Confessing it over the space between motel beds only to hear Sam say, _I’m totally supportive_ and _I just want you to be happy, Dean_.

And here was the thing with Dean’s sexuality. Before that night at Schaffer’s, it was the last thing he wanted to think about. He dismissed any interest in men as something he’d grow out of, or something all guys felt but didn’t talk about or act on. He told himself he was just messed up because of what he sometimes did for money, that it gave his brain mixed signals, and he’d never do anything with a dude if he weren’t paid for it.

If he hadn’t gone to the future, if he hadn’t seen what he could have instead, Dean never would have made it here. He wouldn’t even poke his nose out of the closet. Would barely acknowledge to himself, even at forty, the things he felt. But he wasn’t lying when he said he felt free there. He could act without fearing the consequences. He looked at his future self and saw that his buried feelings didn’t make him less of a man, that he was already enough just as he was. The acceptance he found there, the promise of love, made him want to shout from the rooftops. No matter how unwise it would be.

But Bobby, Dean must’ve known Bobby would be okay. What would he care? He wasn’t John. Dean wasn’t his son, his legacy.

There was more he wanted to say. He wiped at his cheeks with the heel of his palm, looking up at Bobby again. “I’m in love with the angel. Then and now. I can’t hardly bear the fact.”

“Sounds complicated,” said Bobby.

“That’s one word for it,” said Dean, gradually pulling himself back together. Bobby might not be giving him grief over this, but that didn’t make him any more inclined to talk about feelings than usual. Even this moment’s indulgence was for Dean’s own sake and far outside Bobby’s wheelhouse. Dean knew that, and he would rein himself in.

But it was wonderful, how he told someone on purpose and the world hadn’t caved in on itself. John Winchester hadn’t materialized in the room with a shotgun.

Dean collected himself as much as he could, voice still a little raspy as he put on a weak smile and said, “It’s been a rough week.”

“You said… You’ve talked to this angel. In the present, I mean,” said Bobby. “How’s that work, exactly?”

“How do you think?” Dean asked. “I prayed. He turned up in a dream of mine so we could talk.”

“And the angel, this Castiel, he remembers about the time travel and the griffin hunt?”

“Oh, no, he’s Cas from this time,” Dean said. As if the exact mechanics of angel existence and time travel ought to be widely known. “He has no idea he’s gonna fall. He’s not supposed to know me yet.”

Bobby hummed, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “Well,” he said after a moment’s thought. “How’s about we take a look at these Man of Letters time travel books you got and make sure you haven’t messed up the timeline for good? You’ve heard about the grandfather paradox, right?”

“I’ve seen _Back to the Future_ , Bobby, I’m not an idiot.”

Bobby made Dean stop researching after a couple of hours. Dean was so tired the pages blurred, but he would’ve kept at it uselessly anyways if it hadn’t been for Bobby turning out the lights and declaring they were done. Dean slept poorly, mind spinning with ideas of time travel.

The next day they made real progress. Dean called Sam once to check in on him, making sure everything was okay and John wasn’t making motions about moving. Apparently he was deep into research about an annual haunting near Tuscaloosa that would come due within the month, and that would keep him busy. That was good. It eased some of Dean’s guilt about leaving Sam alone with their dad.

Even then, he could hear some of the tension over the phone. Sam and Dad were increasingly at odds. Dean didn’t think it was a good idea to stay away too long. Someone had to be in the middle to cool them down.

“Looks like there’s some kind of a sigil done in blood,” Bobby said at last, flipping a book towards Dean. “It creates a portal drawing blood to blood, a family member, or next of kin. But Dean, this sounds like nonsense. Dragon tears, an angel’s feather?”

“Well I know where we might get one of those, at least,” said Dean. “And after taking on a griffin, I’m not writing off dragons.”

“It smells like witchcraft to me,” said Bobby. “This is a spell, plain and simple.”

“It’s not witchcraft if we’re not witches,” said Dean, stubbornly committed to this point. “Witches are the worst.”

“Look,” Bobby sighed, eyes moving over the various Men of Letters books strewn across the table. “I won’t say this isn’t fascinatin’, but I don’t like it. Maybe there’s a reason no one’s heard a peep from these Men of Letters in decades.”

“Sam and Dean trusted them,” said Dean. “They lived and worked out of their bunker. Still hunting monsters, just like always. Still saving people. Just doing it better than ever before.”

“And what do you want out of this anyways, Dean?” said Bobby. “Because it seems to me that you’ve gotten attached to that glimpse of the future you had. What, you want to abandon the here and now for what you think is some better year?”

Dean looked down at the book in his hands, tracing his fingers over the shape of the sigil. He didn’t have an answer.

“Because it don’t seem to me like you’re doing it to fix the memory problem. Surely you could just pray to your angel and have him tidy that up lickety-split. Don’t you think you should just leave well enough alone?”

“I just want to talk to them,” said Dean. “Already it sometimes feels like it wasn’t real. I just want to hear that it happened, and know that I really helped.” His reasoning sounded so hollow when he had to say it aloud. He shook his head. “I know it’s selfish. I don’t need to be there. They don’t need me for anything. Maybe I just… maybe I just miss them, or miss who I was with them.”

Bobby nodded slowly, his eyes drifting to another part of the room. “If all you want to do is catch up,” he said. “What if we found a way to simply give ‘em a call?”

Dean turned his head over his shoulder to follow Bobby’s gaze, looking at a plain rotary telephone sitting on a side table.

“That could do it,” he said.

He prayed to Cas that night, asking to see him again.

Golden sun on the rocks, on the wildflowers, and painting his skin. Below him, Pacific waves kissed the rocks of Big Sur. Before anything else, he should’ve known by the quietude that this was a dream again. No cars, no people, just waves and wind and gulls.

Castiel picked his way over the rocks, then sat beside him. Dean had questions to ask, but he didn’t speak yet. He lazily turned his head and offered a smile. Cas narrowed his eyes, canted his head, and Dean smiled broader and leaned back to lie against the rocks. He combed his hands through his curtained hair, then settled with his arms behind his head. He liked Big Sur. He’d read all the Jack Kerouac he could get his hands on a few summers back, and because this was a dream he recalled with clarity that which he would not summon up even in his waking consciousness: “On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There’s no need to say another word.”

He didn’t want to say a word.

“Cas,” he said. A name: round and warm that melted on his tongue.

“You like this place,” said Cas. “I can understand why. Would this be heaven to you?”

“I don’t understand,” said Dean.

“Never mind,” said Cas. “You seemed to know so much.”

“I don’t know jack-shit,” said Dean. He cracked one eye open, looking Cas over.

“I assume you called on me for a reason?” said Cas.

“You look like him,” said Dean.

“Because you imagine me that way,” said Cas.

“I know,” said Dean. “But you don’t know the stuff he does. Can you make yourself younger?”

“This is merely a haphazard personation, not a factual representation my true form,” said Cas. “Its outward appearance has no correlation to my age.”

“I said, can you make yourself younger,” Dean repeated. “Could you make yourself my age? What this guy looked like at my age?”

“Is that what you called me here for?”

“Humour me,” said Dean.

It must have happened when he blinked. The face he looked at had altered. Some lines smoothed out while others sharpened. His hair was a little longer, wavier at that length. His eyes looked positively doe-like.

His clothes had changed too. Apparently this vessel used to dress like Chandler Bing, wearing a knitted vest over a massively oversized white t-shirt, half tucked-into belted khakis. Dean grinned.

“Does this suit you?” Castiel asked.

“Helps me tell you apart,” said Dean. “You’re not his Cas, you’re my Cas.”

That earned what surely counted as an angelic fluster. “My name is Castiel,” the angel huffed.

“You don’t like me calling you Cas?” asked Dean. He tipped his head. He was in a dream and that made it safe to say, “Or you don’t like me calling you mine?”

“It makes no difference to me,” Cas said primly. “But I will not stay here just to play dress up.”

“No, stay,” said Dean, putting out a hand, fingertips brushing Cas’ bare forearm. “Stay. I do have a question for you.”

“You know the help I can offer is limited,” he said.

“I don’t want to travel to the future any more,” said Dean.

“That is good,” Cas said with some relief.

“I just want to call.”

“Dean…”

“We found a sigil, and we got to thinking…” He explained their research, explained their goals. Castiel listened patiently, nodding, the coastal wind feathering through his hair. He seemed to like problems and putting his angelic mind to use to solve them.

“You could remove the dragon tears,” he said. “Dragon-based ingredients are amplifiers—scales, tears, blood—but to communicate from your respective temporal planes is _very_ different from physically transporting there. It wouldn’t require half so much energy. The blood-connection between you is ideal, as there is no genetic draw stronger than from self-to-self. Where you want precision is in the time that you are calling. You don’t want to end up at some random point five or fifty years from now, correct?”

“Right,” said Dean. “I was thinking a couple days after I left, a week maybe.”

“It’s difficult, but you can give the spell some direction. Here…” Castiel took up a sharp piece of stone, and carved into the rock some sigils of his own, pointing out a few identifiers within the sigil to pin down the time.

“So what about the other ingredients?” Dean asked. “Where do I find the sands of time?” His eyes brushed over Castiel’s shoulders. “An angel feather?”

“I can bring them to you,” said Cas.

“I thought you weren’t going to interfere?”

Cas shut his mouth quickly, looking out to the ocean. His brow drew in, chin dipping in consternation. “You…” He wet his lips, looked around them, then back at Dean. “You would not tell anyone what I’ve done?”

“Never, Cas,” said Dean, letting the smile ease onto his face. “You don’t know it yet, but I want to look after you.”

Cas diverted his gaze away again quickly. It wasn’t distaste, Dean thought. No, he knew the look on Cas’ face perfectly well. One part self-abnegation. One part plain old bashfulness.

“I wish I could take you there, too,” said Dean. “To see what I’ve seen and know what I know. I don’t think we’re doing too bad, all things considered. I like you-from-the-future a lot.”

“And now?” said Cas, moving one hand in a contained yet sweeping gesture. “I’m just a means to an end?”

“Aw, Cas, don’t be like that,” said Dean, looking down at the ground between them and plucking at some of the rough grass that grew out of the sand. “I like you now a lot better than I thought I would. It makes sense that we’re friends.”

“We’re friends?” said Castiel.

“Of course, idiot,” Dean said fondly. “In the future, you’re my best friend.”

Castiel turned his head sharply to squint out at the water in a poor attempt at concealing the way his lips quirked in a smile, guilty in his sense of personal vanity or pride. Dean suspected that Cas had never been anyone’s best anything before.

He sort of knew how that felt.

“A phone call,” Cas said once more, turning over the prospect. “I don’t see why a phone call should hurt. They already know about you, and you’ll address the issue at hand. The memory issue.”

“Right,” Dean lied.

“I don’t have a vessel on Earth,” said Cas. “I don’t think it would be possible for you to hear or see me without quite painful consequences. But Bobby Singer has a shed, safely out of your way. I will leave the materials you need there by morning.”

Dean woke with a heavy intake of air. Big Sur was gone. He had only a memory of sea air in his lungs. He got up from the couch, scrabbling to the kitchen so he could look out Bobby’s window towards the shed, which he saw only an edge of. He watched for several minutes, and was on the precipice of turning away when the shed was illuminated from within. Dean raised his arm to block the light from his eyes, heard the sound of shattering glass.

Darkness followed, and when Dean could see past the stars in his eyes he winced at the broken windows of Bobby’s shed, glass scattered all around. In the kitchen, the clock on the microwave flashed midnight and the fridge hummed back into activity.

He ventured out the next morning. Found a small sack that contained a silky shiftiness—the sands of time. And a long feather, white at the base, but shifting into the black of an oil slick, catching the sun in a darkened rainbow. He traced his thumb carefully against the edge of the feather, surprised at the holy flutter in his own chest.

Cas. It felt of Cas. He’d have known it anywhere.

Inside again, Bobby helped him to prepare the spell. Dean gave it his blood, then painted the sigil on the underside of the phone, adding in Cas’ date delineations.

“I’ll leave you to this,” Bobby said.

Dean nodded, feeling unready and impatient at once as he wrapped up the cut on his arm. When the front door closed after Bobby, he picked up the receiver.

They’d made him memorise Dean and Sam’s phone numbers in the future in case anything happened. Made him repeat them back half a dozen times as if he weren’t smart enough to have it stick the first time around. He spun the rotary dial; the drag and catch and the wait as it wheeled back. There was a brief pause after he dialled the last number, then the phone began to ring the future.  


* * *

  
Castiel returned to Room 14 of the Golden Eagle Motel. Dean looked over from pouring a second cup of coffee as Cas took off the winter boots, snow pants, and the blue winter coat that Dean had worn the night of the griffin hunt. His own pair of dark brown leather gloves he set aside separately. He wore his usual dress clothes underneath, sans blazer or overcoat.

“How’d it go?” Dean asked.

“It would’ve gone faster if they hadn’t assigned a scouting partner with quite so many ‘hunches,’” said Cas. “But they’ve recovered Rachel and Peter’s bodies.”

Dean gave a somber nod of approval. It wasn’t the first time one of them stayed back to pose as a suitably concerned volunteer to a citizen search crew, finding lost bodies allegedly by chance. It was terrible work. For Dean, it was at least half penance for failing someone. They might be past saving, but at least the families could be brought some closure. “That’s good,” Dean said mutedly. He offered out one coffee cup. “Here. Warm up.”

“I’m not actually cold, you know,” said Cas, coming to the counter. He’d only worn Dean’s winter things to blend in and not draw attention.

“I know,” said Dean.

“Anything from Sam?”

Dean shook his head. “I don’t like it,” he said.

Cas put one hand on Dean’s waist. These touches were still new. Dean bowed his head. He’d sworn not to be miserable just because, but it still wasn’t easy to get out of his own head some days. Going from a state where he only touched Cas when the stakes were high, when life and death were on the line, to touches as casual as breath was more than he knew how to face. And yet by the same token, they’d been so close for so long, so emotionally intimate even while keeping at arm’s length, that this kind of gesture felt like a completely natural extension of what they’d always had.

Cas read right through him. “Overthinking?” he said.

“There’s so much else going on,” Dean said. “When I just want this to be simple.”

“What isn’t simple?” Cas asked it and meant it, and when Dean met those blue doe-eyes he couldn’t keep up the self-imposed anguish. He shook his head, smiled despite himself. Because Cas was right that it wasn’t complicated at all, only that Dean felt so convinced it ought to be.

“Don’t go asking me questions I can’t answer,” he said.

Cas didn’t need to look so self-satisfied. Dean didn’t need to find it so attractive. And yet it was enough that he dipped his head forward for a kiss, the novelty of it still fresh and startling.

The sound of Dean’s phone interrupted them. The chance it might be Sam calling at last meant Dean would never neglect it. He pulled the phone from his back pocket, looking at the number on the screen.

“That,” he said, brow furrowing. “That’s Bobby’s old landline.”

“You’re sure?”

“What the hell?” said Dean. He answered, turning the phone to ‘speaker.’ “Who is this?” he asked.

“Dean?” The voice crackled across the line like an old recording, the words perfectly clear even with static catching on the vowels. “It’s me. I mean it’s Dean.”

Dean exchanged a sharp look with Cas, still frowning. But… “Teen-Dean?”

“Yeah!” An exhale of relief across the line. “I can’t believe it worked.”

“What the hell?” He looked at Cas, who echoed his puzzled expression back down at the phone. “What is this? Did you make it back to the future?”

“No, I’m in ‘98,” said Young Dean. “It’s been about a week, week-and-a-half. As much as time counts for anything.” A boyish rasp of a laugh down the line.

“How are you calling me? From _Bobby’s_?”

“I found a spell in a Men of Letters book. Bobby helped me with it.”

“Wait, you aren’t supposed to remember anything,” said Dean. “What happened? Is something wrong there?”

“No, things are fine,” said Young Dean, casual as anything. “I just started remembering everything that happened, that’s all. It was bits and pieces at first, in dreams and stuff, but I remember pretty much the whole thing, now.”

“Christ,” Dean said, looking at Cas. “We fucked up.”

“It’s okay!” said Young Dean. “I like remembering.”

“That’s not the point,” said Cas, leaning a little closer to Dean as he spoke towards the phone. “This could have consequences for the timeline. Neither you nor Bobby are supposed to know about the Men of Letters, or time travel, or any of the things you might have come to know in the future.”

“Heya, Cas,” said Young Dean, his smile clear through the line. “Actually you know, you were the one to give me the idea?”

“I—” Cas floundered. “I don’t understand.”

“I prayed to you,” said Young Dean. “You helped me get the things for the spell.”

“Wait,” said Cas. “ _Past_ me? You spoke to Past-Me and he gave you the ingredients for a time travel spell?”

“He was way more comfortable when I said it would just be a phone call,” said Young Dean.

“We weren’t supposed to meet yet,” said Cas, and he looked up at Dean beside him. He looked more than concerned. Wary, scared. Afraid, perhaps, of all that this might alter when something had only just begun. He looked back down at the phone. “Dean, you’re playing with fire.”

“I just wanted to talk to you,” said Young Dean. “No big deal. Not my fault I remembered everything.”

Cas closed his eyes, giving a faint shake of his head. “It should’ve worked,” he said quietly.

“We’ll figure this out, Cas,” said Dean.

“You should ask him to erase your memories,” Cas instructed. “He is… I was more powerful, then. He won’t fail.”

“I don’t want it erased,” said Young Dean. “Haven’t you heard what I’m telling you?”

“Dean,” said Dean. “You gotta live in your own time, man.”

“But I could be so much better,” said Young Dean. “If I knew how to do it different. You’d change it if you could, don’t pretend you wouldn’t. And I _can_. I can live better.”

“I’m not pretending,” said Dean. “I know better than you do what’s ahead. But this is where it’s gotta end up. There’s good things that happen, too.”

Young Dean was silent for a moment, the line clicking fuzzily, then he asked, “You take my advice, then?”

“Yeah,” said Dean as Cas said, “Yes.”

They looked up at one another, unspoken questions passing with a glance.

“Good,” said Young Dean. And, “I think Past-Cas is into me.”

“Probably,” said Cas.

“Really?” said Dean, eyes flicking over Cas.

Cas shrugged.

“I mean, he puts up with way too much bullshit from me not to,” said Young Dean.

Dean couldn’t help but smirk. Okay, he could buy that. But god, it was strange to think that at age nineteen his brain was just so cocky and elastic at once that he could identify that kind of thing with ease instead of creating an elaborate story as to why it wasn’t the case.

“I never asked,” said Young Dean. “How much time has passed for you? Are you still in Wyoming?”

“Yeah, we’re about ready to head out, though,” said Dean. “It’s been three days. Spent most of that laid-up.”

“Oh, because of the—”

“Because of the anti-venom, yeah,” said Dean, cutting Young Dean off before he could say something scarringly dirty. Young Dean didn’t need to know what he and Cas had or hadn’t gotten up to, in these early days. Dean didn’t think he’d really understand. Dean, who never knew when to keep things personal, suddenly had something he wanted to protect and keep his own. His fingers brushed out against Castiel’s hip.

“What about Sam, how’s he doing? I guess that’s what I really called to ask about. How things are with you guys, and whether the whole plan worked.”

Another shared look with Cas, not sure if he should lie or not. “Uh, Sam is… We haven’t heard from him, actually.”

“You what?” said Young Dean.

“Where he’s supposed to be meeting the Arimaspoi is pretty remote. He warned us he might run out of signal.”

“You need my help,” said Young Dean.

“No, we don’t,” said Dean. “We’ll figure this out, like we always do.”

“This is why I remember things,” said Young Dean. “There’s a reason the memories came back. Because I need to go there and help you. I’m meant to be there.”

“Brother, you are _really_ going to change your mind about whether things are meant to happen,” said Dean. “Give it a rest, man. Take the sigil off that phone, put the Men of Letters books back, and ask your Castiel to make you forget what happened. I’m telling you this as you, and I’m telling you as a friend.”

“Why did you let Sam go off on his own?” Young Dean asked, and even through the line one got the sense that he’d stood up and started pacing. “You knew it was dangerous.”

“He had his mind made up. He didn’t want us holding him back,” said Dean. “And he isn’t alone: he took Jody with him.”

“Who’s Jody, anyway, hm? She his older brother? No. You’re supposed to be looking out for him.”

“Listen you little shit—”

Cas put a hand on Dean’s arm, giving one shake of his head.

Dean tried to ease off, but his voice remained thick and stern all the same. “I’m going to find him and he’s going to be fine. I don’t need your help.”

“No,” Young Dean snapped. “No. Am I the only one who remembers what your fucking job is? We look after Sammy.”

“I almost forgot that you’re pure, unfiltered John Winchester,” Dean said. “I haven’t forgotten what it is to be a big brother. I’ve done everything for Sam. I always will. But I’ve learned how to think for myself in that time too, and Dad’s way isn’t the only way.”

“You even care what happens to him?” Young Dean asked. “Cause it doesn’t sound like it.”

“Course I fucking care,” said Dean. “You think there’s anything I won’t do? You got no idea what I’ve been ready to sacrifice for him.”

“Oh, I got some idea,” Young Dean said, laughing bitterly. “I know what I do to put food on the table.”

“Fuck you, bringing that into it,” said Dean. “I’ve made deals, I’ve gone to hell for him—”

“You mean you managed to fuck things up again and again. God, wouldn’t it be so much easier to save Sammy if you didn’t keep dragging him into danger along with you?”

“Stop this.” Cas’ gravelly voice came between them. “Stop. That’s enough. You’re winding yourself up, and I’m not even sure who’s talking to who at this point.”

“He’s got no idea—” Dean started.

“Enough,” Cas repeated. With Dean he could place a hand on his arm, thumb stroking in an idle, soothing gesture. “Teen-Dean? We shouldn’t have said anything. We _will_ go after Sam and Jody, and your brother is very skilled. He more than likely has a perfectly reasonable explanation for being out of touch, and even if it doesn’t, believe me when I say we’ve fought through worse. You don’t need to worry about him.”

“How can I not?” Young Dean asked.

“For starters, speak to me in your own time,” said Cas. “Tell him he needs to fix your memory, and to do it right. He still obeys the rules. He’ll know it’s the right thing to do.”

Young Dean went silent over the line. “Okay,” he said at last. “Alright.”

“That’s it?” said Dean.

“I knew it would come to this,” said Young Dean. “Really, I just wanted to let you know I’m happy for you.” He hung up the call with a click. The hollow timbre of an ancient dial tone sounded briefly from the speakers of Dean’s phone.

“Guess that’s that,” said Dean.  


* * *

  
Dean was at Bobby’s again, but it was still false-summer and the windows in the shed were perfectly intact. Cas entered in his young vessel, with his stupid vest and wavy hair, skin slightly sun-kissed as if he remembered an afternoon spent on the rocks at Big Sur.

“I talked to them,” Dean said

“Did you get the closure you wanted?” Cas asked.

Dean shook his head. “They’ve run into a problem,” he said. “Something big.”

Cas frowned faintly. He thought this would be over with.

“Cas made a request,” said Young Dean. “He wants you to take me there.”

“I already explained,” said Castiel, shaking his head. “The card deck. The order of the universe. I can’t travel into the future.”

“The blood spell,” said Dean. “From the Men of Letters.”

“I can’t paint a sigil with angel grace,” said Cas. “It’s not like human blood.”

“But the vessel,” said Dean. “The blood of the vessel from this time could link you to the vessel in the future.” Dean looked down at the ground between them. “At least, that’s what Cas said.”

“This task has been ordered to us?” Cas asked.

Dean nodded.

Cas considered this information for a moment. “If that is the edict, then we must go and assist,” said Cas.

“That’s right,” said Dean.

“I will find the correct vessel,” said Cas. “I will meet you in the flesh.”

This time when Cas vanished, he left Dean in the dream a little longer. And Dean thought with a displaced pang of guilt that this Castiel, the one who hadn’t visited Earth in some time, had forgotten what it was to be lied to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » I think the most fun for me as a former Vancity resident is setting this story in places that are definitively not Vancouver. please when you envision Big Sur, don’t simply picture a random shooting location just off the Sea-to-Sky highway.  
> » keep in mind that I add tags as I go, according to characters and themes that appear. I do my best to tag things that people may either seek out or wish to avoid, so feel free to make tag suggestions if you think there's something important I missed that could misrepresent my fics  
> » ch. 2 title reference: "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas. _Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, / Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea._


	3. instructions on how to wind a watch

The November morning dawned cold and pale. Dean wrapped his arms more tightly around himself, looking around in the early half-light. He wore a hooded sweater under his black denim jacket and it still wasn’t quite enough. His hands were freezing, and he thought of blood-stained gloves he’d left behind on a Wyoming mountain twenty-two years in the future. 

“Cas?” he called out, voice carefully pitched. Bobby was still asleep inside. Dean didn’t want him knowing. He’d get out without drawing attention. “You found him yet?” He didn’t even know if this counted as a prayer. 

He heard the flapping of wings just past his shoulder. 

“Approximately,” said Cas. 

Dean didn’t immediately see the difference. Maybe the hair was just a little lighter and wavier, the stubble not so pronounced. He wore a button-up shirt, oversized and half-unfastened, undershirt visible beneath, tucked into pale, fitted jeans. The thin, gold necklace with a modest cross was an unexpected touch. But his eyes were every bit as blue. 

“I couldn’t reach Jimmy Novak. This is his brother.” 

“What are they, twins?” Dean asked. 

“Yes,” said Cas. “As far as a blood spell is concerned, it’s very nearly as good.” 

Dean paced closer, taking him in. After so long seeing him only in dreams, it was strange that he was real, that he was present. That he could approach Dean with confident, purposeful strides and stand at his side. Maybe it was his relative youth, or maybe it was the subtly more graceful look of this twin’s features, but Dean suddenly felt that the barriers between himself and the angel had disappeared. He hadn’t known that they were there till now. He’d overlooked the way he considered Cas something alluring, but off-limits and untouchable. Not so, now. 

“Shall we go, Dean?” Cas asked. 

These thoughts were no good, sure to offend an angel who had yet to fall. Neither would he let himself consider whether this was a betrayal. He could not think about the potential consequences of his actions. He had righteous, honourable reasons even if they were veiled in deceit. Between him and a powered-up Cas, one professedly much more powerful at this moment than he would be in the future, they would find Sam and save the day. 

They entered the shed with the blown-out windows. Cas prepared the spell while Dean studied his shoulders under the billowy shirt, thinking of angel wings and the oil-black feather he’d touched. 

Cas intoned the spell with that same deep, gravelly voice that Dean was used to. It was almost strange to hear it coming from a younger version of him, like at this age, young twenties, it ought to be higher and smoother. But underneath it all Cas was still a billions-of-years-old celestial entity to whom a couple of decades truly didn’t make a difference. 

Except, Dean thought, of where they’d made all the difference. Falling from heaven must change things for a person. 

The sigil glowed with its manifesting power on the wall. Cas reached for Dean—not his elbow or his shoulder but for his hand, a grip that was warm and dry and firm. Dean clasped back tightly as Cas’ other hand rose to press flat against the sigil, a burst of light breaking apart their surroundings. 

They landed in a lamp-lit bedroom. There was a cut-off shriek that turned into a curse, and Dean raised his eyes to face the barrel of a gun held by a girl with long, loose blonde hair. She stood unsteadily on her mattress, though she held the gun true, wearing a pair of black boxers and a large, loose t-shirt for sleeping in. 

Her instinct was to point a gun—a gun she had either by or _in_ her bed—which Dean suspected meant she couldn’t be all bad and evidently knew a thing or two about self-protection. She didn’t fire. She now _looked_ properly between them, then said, “What the _fuck_?” 

“I think you got the spell wrong, buddy,” said Dean. 

“What _are_ you?” the girl asked. 

“Nothin’,” said Dean. “Just some guys who took a wrong turn. Sorry to bother you. We’ll just— that the way out?” He pointed at the bedroom door. 

“Don’t move,” she said, more firmly raising the gun. She kept her finger off the trigger, which showed sense and experience, but Dean didn’t like where it was pointed. 

“Claire?” said Castiel. “Claire Novak?” 

“Who's asking? I don’t care if you’re demons or shifters,” she said, snarling. “I’ll kill you either way.” 

“We ain’t demons,” said Dean. 

“Sounds like something a demon would say, Teen-Beat.” 

“My name’s Dean Winchester—” 

“I know who you are,” said Claire. “Obviously.” 

“Oh wait,” said Dean, eyes widening. He looked at Cas, as if he’d get it too. “This is _Claire_ -Claire. ‘She’s like our kid,’ Claire.” 

Castiel didn’t show any understanding, face impassive. “Yes,” he said. “This is Jimmy Novak’s daughter. The blood spell clearly took us to her as a nearby blood relation.” He looked around himself, reading past the limitations of the room and, probably, well into the universe. He gave a nod of his head. “I am, however, confident I took us to the right time.” 

“Why do you look like a young version of my dad?” Claire asked, pointing the gun at Cas now. She lifted an eyebrow at Dean. “And what’s with the Nick Carter hair?” 

“It is _not_ —” 

“I have the gun,” said Claire. “You want to talk? Then prove you aren’t monsters. There’s a silver knife and some holy water on the desk. Walk slow. No sudden movements.” 

“Seriously?” Dean bitched, crossing over to the desk, hands raised and kept clear of his pockets. “I’m not a shifter. I don’t want to cut myself. Cas, just show her you’re an angel. Do a party trick.” 

“I don’t get invited to parties,” said Cas. 

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Claire, rolling her eyes. “If you aren’t the real deal, you sure have the act down. Let’s see it, Dean.” 

Dean pulled back his sleeve and sliced the silver knife over his skin with a perfectly-human wince. He followed up with taking a swig from the flask of holy water, giving a shrug as it had no effect. “Happy?” he asked, crossing back to Castiel, offering the holy water to him. 

Cas didn’t take the flask. He reached out to touch Dean’s wrist first, healing the slice on his arm with a glow of blue light as the wound sealed. Claire lowered her gun. 

“Great timing on that one, Cas,” said Dean. 

“Was that a party trick?” Cas asked, tipping his head curiously. “I may have misunderstood parties.” 

Dean thought Cas had been literal-minded and culturally uninformed when he met him in the future, but it had nothing on Past-Cas. He sighed. “Oh angel, how do I do it?” 

Cas narrowed his eyes and looked as if he would speak, but held back. 

“You ready to tell me what’s going on here?” Claire asked. She stepped down from her bed. She still looked wary, but at least she wasn’t pointing the gun anywhere. “Why are you all… young?” 

“It’s complicated,” said Dean with a shake of his head. “We time-travelled here from the past.” 

Claire paused, then nodded. “That’s it?” she said. “What’s complicated about that?” 

Dean expected disbelief and astonishment. He’d never faced the full power of Claire Novak’s quick mind and abounding condescension. “Look, you wouldn’t get it,” said Dean. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.” 

She turned away from them with a caustic smile, combing fingers through her hair. She picked up a green hoodie from the back of a chair to pull over her head. “Uh, yeah, you sure do,” she said. “I mean, you realize you are in _my_ room?” 

“Yeah, about that,” said Dean. 

“You’re a blood relative,” Cas interjected. “The spell we used took us to you instead of our target.” 

“Your target?” 

“We were trying to reach me and Cas,” said Dean. “I mean in the future. The present, I guess. We’ll get out of your hair, alright?” 

“I don’t sense them,” said Cas. 

“You what?” said Dean. 

“I don’t sense them,” Cas repeated. “I should be able to locate anyone on this Earth, but they are absent. Has something happened? Are we too late?” 

“You won’t find them with your angel radar,” said Claire. “You hid them from angels with some Enochian spell.” She looked at Dean. “Carved into your ribs.” 

Dean grimaced at the thought. 

“But surely I should know my own presence,” said Cas. “I cannot detect him either.” 

“You were on the run for a while too,” said Claire. “Got your first tattoo and everything. I think when you were human?” 

Cas didn’t say anything. His face was not stony, but still. Finally he uttered, “For what sin could I have lost my grace?” 

“Cas, buddy,” Dean said, bumping a knuckle against his arm to ground him. “The world gets complicated, alright? But you get your grace back.” 

“How do you know about that?” Claire asked. “If you’re from the same time as he is, you shouldn’t even know angels exist.” 

“I was already here,” said Dean. “They needed my help last week for this hunt? I went back to my own time for a little when it was over, but then I called the future, and Dean said Sam’s missing—” 

“Sam?” said Claire. “Does that mean Jody’s missing?” She pushed roughly past him as she charged for her phone on a dresser. “ _Lead_ with that, asshole.” She rang a number from her recent contacts, waiting impatiently as it inevitably went to voicemail. 

“Could you find her?” Dean asked Cas. “Jody.” 

“Jody Mills,” Claire filled in. “Born 1976. Hunter. Sheriff. Mom.” 

Cas briefly concentrated, but then he shook his head. “I don’t detect her.” 

“She’s not hidden too, is she? With the whole,” Dean gestured at his chest, “rib engravings.” 

“She wasn’t marked,” said Claire, voice kept at a neutral level. Dean was no stranger to Claire’s carefully guarded face. He was fairly sure he’d worn that look himself before. She’d gone still at the ominous news, but there was an obstinate denial that won out. She’d fight, even when things seemed past fighting for. God, the girl had grit, and that was something Dean could admire. If she was like his daughter, he was proud of her. Then and now. 

“There are other reasons she could be hard to find. Right, Cas?” Dean asked, looking to him for a helpful contribution. “Other reasons you can’t see her?” 

Cas looked at him for a long moment, then at Claire. He seemed to clue into his role and said, “If she were in a building warded against angel sight, I would not be able to locate her.” 

Claire gave a humourless laugh. “The bedside manner is really on point, Castiel,” she said. “Very convincing.” 

“Look,” said Dean. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ve gotta catch up with our modern-day selves, fill them in on what’s going on, and we’ll find Sam, find Jody, and save the whole damn day, alright?” 

“Wow, Dean,” said Claire. “So bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.” She gave him a second look. “I don’t _hate_ it.” 

It was astounding, how she managed to balance sounding like the coolest kid in the cafeteria and the edgiest of outcasts at the same time. “Well you know me,” said Dean. “I’m adorable.” 

“I’m totally making fun of you for this in the future,” said Claire. “ _After_ we find Jody.” She looked down at her phone, typing in a text. “You have a phone? What am I saying, of course you don’t have a phone. You’re prehistoric. I’ll keep looking for Jody. Tell Dean to call me if he learns _anything_ , alright? He’s gotta _call me_.” 

“You got it, Claire.” 

“And before you go, I’m gonna need photo evidence,” she said. She held up her phone, didn’t give them time to smile. Dean and Cas both wore slightly dumbfounded expressions on their young faces. That, at least, had Claire breaking into a smile. “Perfect,” she said. 

“How will we reach our future selves?” Castiel asked Dean. “They are untraceable.” 

“We’ll go to the Golden Eagle Motel in Wyoming,” said Dean. “That’s where they were last.” 

Cas didn’t bother with the courtesy of an agreement or a warning. He simply put a hand on Dean’s arm and they were all at once in Wyoming. 

“Holy shit,” Dean said, feeling as if his feet weren’t under him. The carpet of Claire’s bedroom has become the even asphalt of the motel parking lot. 

“Which room?” said Cas. 

“14,” said Dean. 

Cas looked at the door and narrowed his eyes before giving a disproving hum. “I sense only one soul in Room 14. It is currently occupied by Linda Figueroa, a 48-year-old woman from Las Cruces. She’s here to meet the man that she’s been dating online for the past year. I don’t believe that Dean and Castiel are there any longer.” 

“Mighta made that first date pretty memorable,” said Dean. 

“I don’t understand why they were not waiting for us,” said Castiel. “If Castiel asked for my help, why is he nowhere to be found?” 

“Probably he thought the spell would take you straight to him,” said Dean. “But you know what I just realised? We left Baby back at a car rental place in Casper, he’ll have to go there first.” 

“You left a _baby_ at a rental facility?” 

“I hated to do it, but we had no choice,” Dean said honestly, though a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Just get us to the Redline Rent-a-Car in—” 

They were no longer at the Golden Eagle Motel. 

“Man alive, Cas, give a guy some warning,” said Dean. He brushed off the shoulder of his jean jacket as if the trip had dusted him up. 

Cas found the right spot, though. Safely in a corner of the lot sat the Impala. Dean approached reverently. “There she is,” he said. 

“The baby is a car,” said Cas. 

“Not just any car,” said Dean. 

Castiel frowned, considering the vehicle briefly before giving up on discovering its supposed singularity. “If you say so.” 

“I don’t know how much time we’ll have to kill till they get here,” said Dean. “But I’m starving and that place does burgers.” He pointed across the road to a little diner with large front windows. It would let them keep an eye on the lot while he ate. 

Cas started to reach out his hand and Dean leaned quickly back. “Whoa, whoa, I can stand to walk, buddy. Let’s save your energy.” 

“It doesn’t cost me anything,” Cas said. “I do not tire like humans.” Still, he went patiently to the crossing lights with Dean. 

It started to hit Dean, just how much Cas had given up over the years. This version of him was powerful and self-certain, holding certain truths about Heaven and Earth to be immutable. And it wasn’t just the younger vessel he’d taken; there had been something weary in the older Castiel. Something almost mortal. Dean hadn’t realised it at first, distracted by the power to heal, to time-hop, and to take on demons in a fight. But with this younger, unmet Cas it was different. The prim way he sat across from Dean, not eating, not touching his glass of water, just observing the trappings of the restaurant with unveiled curiosity, emphasized how exotic and transcendent he was. 

And this was who Dean fell in love with. 

He was staring. He was absolutely staring. 

And Cas looked back at him, head tipped at first, then straightening. He did not look away. No one had told him that people don’t stare like this, don’t look endlessly at one another for no reason. Dean should teach him that it wasn’t done, that it went against unwritten codes of proper conduct. Dean knew these rules down to his bones. He knew that other people might take notice and that he should look away to lead by example, because Cas’ face just looked so openly _curious_ , as if he wouldn’t stop of his own volition, as if Dean held the same intrigue as a puzzle or a work of art. 

Dean wanted to say something. _Anything_. But he only knew two things in this moment: the image of Cas and the loud beating of his own heart. What would he say, anyway? _One day I’ll love you_? Or even, _One day, I think you’ll love me_? How could he explain all of that to an angel who’d just arrived on earth and didn’t remember what a lie was, never caught a joke, and still believed in a divinely ordered universe? 

He understood, then, how his future self could doubt Cas’ capacity for human feeling. Could tell himself for years that he didn’t stand a chance. He was a creature so magnificent and _other_ that if Dean thought about it for too long, if he thought beyond the corporeal vessel Cas inhabited, any reciprocated connection with him seemed an impossibility. 

“Cas,” he said, and the word didn’t break the spell, but Dean saw a flash of black from the corner of his eye beyond the diner window that did. 

He jerked in his seat. “Oh shit, they’re leaving.” 

Cas took his hand across the table. 

They were in the backseat of the Impala, Young Dean behind Cas, and Past-Cas seated behind Dean in the driver’s seat. 

“What the _fuck_ —” Dean swerved, but rapidly corrected. He looked over his shoulder at Young Dean, gripped the steering wheel tight, then pulled incautiously into the parking lot of a run-down strip mall. 

“What the _hell_ are you doing here?” Dean asked. 

“Be not afraid,” Past-Cas said with grave authority. “We’ve arrived to assist with the deputation. What are our orders?” He looked at Cas. 

Cas looked back. 

They squinted at each other for a long moment. 

“Are they telepathic?” Young Dean asked. 

“Not unless they’re on angel radio,” said Dean. “I think?” 

“No,” said Past-Cas. “I am only wondering… Castiel. What has happened to you?” 

“Many things,” said Cas, voice heavy. 

“Okay, this is enough,” said Dean. “Out of the car. Everybody.” He had to get up. He had to pace. So the four men stepped out into the parking lot, a strange scene playing out before a hair salon, insurance brokerage, Midwestern sushi restaurant of dubious quality, and a florist’s shop that had seen better days. 

Young Dean knew his ruse was up. He only hoped that Past-Cas wouldn’t be too disappointed in him. Even if he deserved it. 

“Leave him out of it,” said Dean, waving off Past-Cas and pointing at Young Dean instead. “You. What did you do?” 

“I’m here to help you find Sam,” said Young Dean, chin lifting, even as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his denim jacket. He gestured at Past-Cas. “I brought him. You guys mentioned he had more juice and I thought, well, hey, easy fix, save everybody’s skins. You’re welcome, by the way.” 

“We are here by divine command,” Past-Cas said. He nodded at his counterpart. “Castiel received revelation that we were to come.” Turning more to Cas he added, “I enacted the blood spell as requested, though it brought us somewhat unexpectedly to Claire Novak.” 

Cas shook his head, glanced at Dean, then said, “There was no order issued for you to come here. Teen-Dean wasn’t being forthright.” 

“I don’t understand,” said Past-Cas. 

“When humans want something badly, they lie.” 

Young Dean would’ve given anything not to see the disappointment in Castiel’s eyes. He scuffed the toe of his shoe against the ground. For a bare moment, his self-assurance wavered. He remembered the future as a place where things had been different for him. He thought they liked having him around as much as he’d liked being there. Facing Dean’s barely-contained anger and Cas’ clear misgiving was a far cry from the welcome he sought. 

“I only came to help Sam,” he said. That, at least, remained. 

“And what do you think we’re doing?” said Dean. “Time travel isn’t a game, Teen-Dean.” 

“I know that.” 

“You don’t get to just drop in here whenever you feel like it.” 

“I wasn’t.” 

“You’re messing with the way of things. With everything we’ve done to save people all this time. If you fuck up the future—” 

“Maybe I want to fuck up the future,” said Young Dean. His mouth pulled into a snarl to prevent some other emotion from taking control. “You never painted a very good picture of it.” 

“That’s not your choice to make,” said Dean. 

“Why not? What if I could do it better?” 

“You couldn’t,” said Dean. “You have no idea. No fucking idea. This is the world that was never wiped out by angels. The world where most people don’t know about the war going on behind the cosmic curtain. The one me and Sam don’t kill each other in. You got no idea of the stakes we faced. And what a balancing act it all is.” 

Young Dean’s brow drew in. What Dean said seemed impossible. There was no way he and Sam would hurt each other in any world, no matter what happened to them. He looked at Castiel, whose lips were pressed tightly together. 

“It’s true,” Cas said. “As far as anyone can tell. The decisions that you and Sam will make seem to be very carefully calibrated towards survival here, in a way that failed in most other iterations.” 

“What do you even mean, other iterations? Where are you getting this?” Young Dean asked. He glanced at Past-Cas, and it wasn’t much assurance that he looked equally confused. 

“Don’t tell him,” Dean said to Cas. “He already knows more than he should. We gotta send him home before this gets worse.” 

“I don’t have the power,” said Cas. 

Past-Cas lifted his arms slightly, regarding himself with a shake of his head. “This vessel would burn out on the return trip,” he said. “It needs a week to recharge. The spell we used drew on his soul, not my grace.” 

“That isn’t…” Cas tipped his head to the side. “That isn’t Jimmy Novak.” 

“Jimmy was not available to me,” said Past-Cas. “But I found his brother Lawrence to be of equal faith and strength.” 

“Oh,” said Cas. 

Dean noticed the minute change in Cas’ expression. “What?” he asked. 

“Lawry Novak,” said Cas. “He— He died in 1998.” 

“Shit,” said Dean. 

“Jimmy believed it was a car accident, but if I—” Cas paced away, rubbing at his temple. “If I destroyed the _entire_ Novak family…” 

Dean caught him by the elbow, darting a look at the drawn faces of Young Dean and Past-Cas. “Hey. Hey. You don’t know that,” he said. “And it’s not on you. It’s on him. Me. For not taking ‘no’ for an answer.” 

Young Dean heard this. Dean didn’t bother trying to hide it from him. That would be a kindness he didn’t deserve. So he set jaw his tighter, chin lifting, but he tellingly wouldn’t look at any of them. 

Dean paced heavily away from Cas, coming to stand between the three of them. “So now we got another problem to fix, having you two here. Thanks for that, Teen-Dean.” Young Dean scowled at him for it. “Looks like we’re stuck with you for at least a week, so let’s see if we can’t salvage _something_ here.” He looked at Young Dean, coldly lifting one brow. “Go on. It’s your moment. What was your big plan for rescuing Sam?” 

Young Dean faltered, looking at Cas, at Past-Cas, finding help nowhere. “I thought Past-Cas could find Sam once we got here. Take us to him ,or pull him out of danger, but… but he’s hidden from us. The Jody lady too.” 

Dean clapped his hands once with a mirthless laugh, wagged a finger at Young Dean. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s _right_. Because you don’t know jack-shit about what’s going on in the world these days. Well, that? That is just awesome. Great plan, Teen-Dean. Really pulling through for us.” 

“Dean,” warned Cas. 

“Aren’t you glad he’s here?” said Dean. “I mean, aren’t you just tickled fucking pink to have the boy hero on our side? Man, where would we be if he’d listened to us and stayed in his own time?” 

Young Dean bore the admonishment because in some ways having failed was nothing new to him. He didn’t know what he hated more, though. Knowing he deserved Dean’s reproval, or seeing his father’s face in his own. 

“Dean,” said Cas, “we aren’t getting anywhere by—” 

“Hold on, hold on,” said Dean, reaching for his coat pocket. “I’m getting a call. It’s Claire.” 

Young Dean stepped forward, desperate for action as well as a shift in focus. “She said she’d call if she found anything on Sam or Jody,” he said. 

“Not so fast, I’ve got this,” said Dean, holding up a hand and starting to step away. “You just stand there and focus on not fucking something up for, like, five minutes. Can you do that for me?” He didn’t wait for an answer, taking the call and pacing towards the edge of the lot. 

Past-Cas had observed every verbal volley, and now his gaze followed Dean, ever-studious. Castiel, meanwhile, approached Young Dean cautiously. Young Dean knew that Cas could offer him no sincere comfort. Young Dean had ruined too much for that. Had he seriously damned Lawry Novak by pushing Past-Cas to come here? 

“You were hoping for a warmer welcome,” said Cas. 

“I dunno,” said Young Dean, shaking his head. “I just thought I could help. I helped before, didn’t I?” 

“We asked for it then,” said Cas. His face remained grim, eyes downcast. “This time, we asked you not to come.” 

“Sorry to have outstayed my welcome,” said Young Dean. “I guess I didn’t realise you only wanted me when I was useful to you. I should’ve known better, I really should’ve.” 

“That’s not what I wanted to say,” said Cas. 

“I mean you’d think I’d know by now,” said Young Dean. “You’d think I’d’ve figured it out.” 

“Please,” said Cas. “Please don’t.” 

“Cas, man,” said Young Dean, barely holding himself together. “I regret it, okay? I regret coming here against your orders and pulling Past-Cas in along with me. I’ve learned my lesson. If I could go home now I’d have half a mind to, but I still want to protect Sam. I’m gonna help, okay? I’m gonna be useful to you.” 

“This is not your burden alone,” said Cas. “I failed to amend your memories correctly. I must not have been strong enough.” 

“No, Cas,” said Young Dean, out of loyalty rather than logic. “It’s not on you.” 

“Isn’t it? I wouldn’t have invited you to the future if I knew the consequences it would have. For you. And, potentially, everything.” 

Dean came back into earshot, bidding a brusque goodbye over the phone, then ending the call. “Claire finally reached Jody on her cell,” he said. “So I called her up and she says she’s out in Carmel with no idea how she got there. Staying with some hunter who found her knocked-out in Yosemite. Kooky little place warded to the gills against demons, angels, spirits, anything you could name.” 

“And Sam?” asked Young Dean. 

Dean grimaced, eyeing Young Dean warily, but answering him. “She doesn’t remember anything,” he said. “Whether they got in the way of demons or whether it has something to do with the Arimaspoi, we got no way of knowing.” 

“Very well,” said Past-Cas, breaking his silence at last. He stepped forward, used to being a man of action, leader of a garrison. “I will be taking us to Carmel?” 

“Nah,” said Dean with a shake of his head. “We’re driving. Baby’s our travelling armory and I’m not leaving her behind again.” 

“Right,” said Past-Cas. “The car-baby. It is…” He looked around the parking lot, where the cars were not necessarily sporty, but certainly more recent. “It is not a very young car, comparatively.” 

“Don’t worry about that part,” said Young Dean. 

“Then you would rather that Teen-Dean and myself go now to Carmel,” said Past-Cas. “Perhaps I can read Jody’s soul and it will remember what her mind doesn’t.” 

“No,” said Cas. “It’s too painful. I can’t let you.” 

“And I’m not letting you two out of my sight,” Dean added. “You’ve caused enough chaos already, I’m not giving you the chance to mess things up more. Jody’s working on things with this hunter lady while we make our way down there. She’ll call us if she learns anything.” 

It was a disturbingly quiet car ride, with Dean refusing to even play music. Young Dean knew it for what it was, a punishment. 

And it was bad from up front, the icy silence from Dean, and the overwrought tension from Cas, but the worst part was having Past-Cas at his side. Young and innocent and uncomplicated. His silence was the loudest. 

Of course it was the first to break. 

“I don’t understand,” he announced to the car. “I was a good soldier.” 

Cas looked over his shoulder, quietly surveying the younger self, younger vessel. Unlike Dean, he didn’t seem to spit fire when he had to face his mirror. “You tried to be,” he said. 

“I have been compromised by accepting this mission,” said Past-Cas. “I might as well have listened to the serpent in the garden.” He shifted stiffly in his seat, raising his chin. “I am guilty of vanity. Teen-Dean said that we were not just allies, but friends.” 

“Yes,” said Cas, gazing at Dean’s profile. “Friends and more.” 

Past-Cas narrowed his eyes, not understanding. “How do we become friends with liars, Castiel?” 

“Tell me how you really feel,” muttered Young Dean. 

“Because they have good hearts,” said Cas. 

“When I return to my time, I will make better choices,” said Past-Cas. “I won’t be flattered by Dean Winchester into falling from God’s grace. Perhaps this adventure was intended as a lesson. A parable on the risks of vanity and pride.” 

“You won’t remember it,” said Cas. “I’m sure of that.” 

“Cas,” said Dean. “With all respect, you aren’t batting a hundred on memory patches these days.” 

“I’d have nothing to do with it,” Cas said, looking at Dean again. “It won’t be the first time they’ve ‘corrected’ me. The angel with ‘a crack in his chassis,’ remember?” 

Dean looked over with a raised brow. 

“I’ve been reset many times,” said Cas. 

“That isn’t true,” said Past-Cas. He repeated, “I’m a good soldier.” 

“You wouldn’t remember, of course you wouldn’t remember,” said Cas. “But any time you felt too much, fell out of line, they brought you in for repair.” 

In the driver’s seat, only half-aware of the road, Dean seemed to realise the impact of this for the first time. “You’ve been ‘corrected’ before,” he said. His fingers drummed against the wheel. He almost didn’t say it, had to force it from his lips. “You been in love before?” 

It wasn’t jealousy speaking. It was forward-facing fear. The unspoken question: could it be taken away again? 

Cas squinted at Dean, and although Young Dean couldn’t say what made the expression all that different (perhaps it was just the hint of a smile), he swore he saw something softer in it. 

“It’s true that I have no way of recalling what I don’t remember,” he said. “But I can say with some confidence that I have only overthrown their attempts at brainwashing once. That strikes me as being rather… indicative.” 

Dean’s thumb smoothed against Baby’s steering wheel. “Once?” 

“We had found the angel tablet,” said Cas. “I was, if you recall, beating you senseless.” 

“You two are so fucked up,” said Young Dean. They ignored him. 

“You said you didn’t know what broke the connection,” said Dean. 

“Oh, I knew,” said Cas, easing back in his seat to look out at the road again. “But I also knew by then that when you really want something, you lie.” 

“I—” said Past-Cas, following the interaction from the backseat. “I fall in love with a human.” Perhaps summoning up some essence of Lawry Novak’s soul beneath, he covered his mouth and uttered, “Oh my stars and garters.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » sorry things are tough for Past-Cas & Teen-Dean, but I promise so much good content for them yet  
> » ch. 3 title reference: “[Instructions on How to Wind a Watch](https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/blackburn/blackburn_translation_cortazar_cronopios.html)” by Julio Cortázar. _Death stands there in the background, but don’t be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself…_


	4. oh you who love me, love me bravely

They were more than halfway across Utah before Dean finally caved to Young Dean’s repeated arguments to switch off driving. He had to insist multiple times, “I’m _you_ , we’ve been driving since we were nine years old.” Still, it was like Dean didn’t trust him with the car, despite the fact Young Dean by default treated it with just the same care.

They stopped outside of Reno, booking one motel room with two beds since the angels wouldn’t sleep. A tall, neon sign right outside their window blinked in an irritatingly slow pattern, and a buzzing baseboard heater clicked into action. Young Dean suspected he wouldn’t sleep much either.

The Deans found themselves on their own for dinner. Young Dean hadn’t quite caught what Cas and Past-Cas were up to in the meantime. What did Castiel do most nights anyway? Was he bored? Was he busy? Young Dean didn’t know quite how to ask.

The bar they found was some dive with no windows, old carpet, and a few lousy casino games. They were brighter and more graphic-heavy than what Young Dean knew in his time, but the general shabbiness and empty-eyed transfixion on the players’ faces didn’t make them at all enticing. The food smelled and tasted decent, though, and the wings were cheap. Their server never questioned Young Dean’s age. He went for a glass of the house lager. Its foamy head quickly dissolved to nothing.

By the time he neared the bottom of his beer, Young Dean pushed the platter stacked with stripped chicken bones away so that he could lean an arm on the table, unconsciously mimicking Dean. “What time will we head out tomorrow?” he asked. At this point he had barely made it around to having his questions answered, and for the present kept them neutral and pragmatic. He was in Dean’s bad books, even if there was nothing to gain by remaining at odds with each other. Young Dean couldn’t undo his mistakes and Dean had to know that. But Dean also had his pride.

“Leave at six-thirty,” Dean said. “Get there around noon.” He lifted his pint glass, his attitude somewhat less bristly now that he had food and beer in his stomach.

“You been to the West Coast lately?”

Dean shrugged, mouth twisting briefly. “Stopped going much. Makes me think of Sam,” he answered. “Stanford. I used to like it, I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Young Dean, regretting that he’d asked. He didn’t want to know he’d one day be bitter about the Coast. It had always felt like something that was his own, something that he hadn’t just borrowed from John. Something he didn’t need to explain to anyone.

“We did go to LA,” said Dean. “Three or four years ago? It was—” he smiled a little, which was a win. “It was actually sort of funny, for being terrible. Lucifer was possessing Vince Vincente.”

“Vince Vincente? Like, rainbow wig, leopard prints—”

“Yeah, that one,” said Dean, tipping his head. “We’ve had some crazy times.”

Young Dean caught sight of the waitress making her rounds, sure to come to their table next. He hesitated a moment, but risked asking, “Hey, am I allowed to get some more wings?”

Dean looked at him, a careful and studious gaze. “If you’re hungry, have more food,” he said.

“I didn’t know if… I don’t have any cash. It’s your money and you seemed mad at me.”

“Food’s not about punishment, no matter how mad I am,” said Dean. “You need to eat, then you eat.”

The arrival of the waitress briefly interrupted them. Young Dean placed an order for more wings, and Dean asked for two more beers when she had the chance.

Young Dean didn’t know what to say in the silence that followed the waitress’ departure. He felt like he’d gotten things wrong somehow.

“You’re hungry all the fucking time, man,” Dean said at last. “I remember being nineteen.”

Young Dean gave an indifferent nod. He doubted Dean remembered as well as he thought.

He rotated his beer glass slowly in the ring of condensation it left on the table. “I’m surprised you booked us a double room,” Young Dean said. “Thought you’d want some time with Cas.”

“And leave you to somehow start World War Three when I’m not looking?” said Dean. “I’m not putting it past you at this point.”

“I would’ve been good,” said Young Dean. “I’m being good. I’m helping. Come on, don’t hold this against me forever.”

“I just might,” said Dean. “Of all the dumb decisions I’ve made…”

“Anyway, we weren’t talking about me,” said Young Dean. “I was asking about Cas. So?”

Dean narrowed his eyes a little, no longer letting his gaze wander around the bar. “So what?”

“So you _know_ what,” said Young Dean, smiling a little, leaning in conspiratorially. He was determined to get back in Dean’s good graces, and surely he couldn’t stay mad on this topic. “Was it good or was it _good_?”

Dean laughed and shook his head. “You’re such a little perv.”

“Hey, so are you. You’re an old man perv, which is worse,” said Young Dean. “Come on, you aren’t even talking out of school, here. It’s just me.”

“And it’s not any of your business,” said Dean.

“Sure it’s my business. I’m you. And I’m the one who got you together. So it’s double my business. I just wanna know what we have to look forward to. You know what they say: angel in the streets, demon in the—”

“No, no, you do not go there,” said Dean. He heaved a sigh, leaning over the table and rubbing his forehead. Young Dean was just so damn persistent. He would never let this go. “Look, there’s not a lot to say,” said Dean.

“You’re not going to offend Cas’ maidenly virtue,” said Young Dean. “You can give me details. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I’m serious,” said Dean. He pressed his lips together and shook his head, sincerity taking the place of his earlier amusement. “There’s not a lot to say. We haven’t done anything yet.”

“You what?” Young Dean asked. Dean just shrugged. Young Dean frowned, searching his mind for what bend of reality would allow for this. “But… The equipment’s all in working order, right?”

“There’s nothing to worry about _there_ ,” said Dean. “But you know it’s barely been any time at all since you left—”

“You two had a motel room to yourselves for days,” said Young Dean. “You have any idea what I’d do for that kind of privacy?”

“I know,” said Dean. “Look, it’s complicated.”

“Don’t brush me off with, ‘it’s complicated,’” said Young Dean. “Goddammit, Dean, I know what goes through _my_ head when I see him.”

“When I say ‘it’s complicated’ I mean ‘it’s _complicated_ ,’” said Dean. “There’s the normal things, like being his friend for twelve years, him being an angel, and then having all this Sam and Jody stuff going on…”

“Right, because him being an angel is very normal,” said Young Dean.

“Maybe it is, relatively speaking,” said Dean. “Then there’s the other things. Like the fact that we’ve never been with a guy when it wasn’t for money.”

Young Dean set his jaw and gave a slow nod of his head. It was a question he hadn’t asked, but not something he hadn’t thought about. He assumed that over the course of twenty-two years he’d have lapsed sometimes. Nothing serious and all in secret, but surely he wouldn’t deny himself something he wanted badly enough. But no, Dean of the future bore his desire in silence. Or, perhaps it was better to say, he decisively ignored it.

“So even the thought,” Young Dean said, filling in the gaps he knew his mind would make. “Even the thought of being with him reminds you of that. That’s… that’s just awesome. Great. Real healthy. I’m so glad we managed to fuck up the one good thing that might happen to us, all because we… yeah.” He swallowed hard. “Yeah. Good.”

“I’m not saying it’s never,” said Dean, shoulders hunched forward, gaze darting unseeingly across the table. “This is early days and I got a lot to… a lot to process. I want it. It’s not that I don’t. It’s just…”

“Complicated,” said Young Dean. His eyes were a little full, but the stubborn set of his jaw held it all in. “And you still want to send me back there?” he asked. “To the time when I don’t know anything and am too dumb to ask for a better life?”

“Kid…”

“When does it end?” Young Dean asked. “Hm? When’s the last time?”

Dean drew in a breath and pulled back from the table, gaze shifty. “Come on, we don’t have to do this.”

“So after nineteen. Alright. When’s the worst time?”

“You know the worst time,” said Dean.

Young Dean half-choked on his intake of air, not sure if he wanted to laugh or what. “Well. That’s a cold comfort,” he said. “But I guess it’s something. How can you be okay with it, man? With sending me back there knowing full well what’s ahead? You would never send someone else to do that, I know you wouldn’t. Even if the world was at stake.”

“Don’t,” said Dean, though his voice sounded weak. “Don’t. It’s different. You can’t let me think of you as someone separate.”

“Yeah, god forbid you show me some fucking charity,” said Young Dean. He felt too near breaking so he took a long drink from his beer, letting it burn with how rapidly it went down his throat.

“I know you come out the other side,” said Dean. “I know that years from now, you don’t think about it every other moment.”

“Except years from now I’m fucked in the head,” said Young Dean. “And won’t even touch the guy I’m in love with. So that’s working out just swell.”

“You—” Dean cut off abruptly as the waitress set down two beers and a fresh plate of suicide wings in front of Young Dean. They both noticed her constrained expression, sharply raised eyebrows, and intense focus on the platter in her hands.

“Enjoy,” she said with feeble cheerfulness, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

Dean returned the sentiment with a bland, tightly forced smile.

“Not the worst thing waitstaff in Nevada have overheard, you figure?” Young Dean asked after a tense moment.

“Not the worst,” Dean promised.

“You’re gonna—”

“She’s getting a good tip, yeah.”

Young Dean ate his wings, and Dean drank his beer, and they didn’t discuss the rest.

* * *

Young Dean caught some rest, despite feeling aware even in unconsciousness of the flashing light outside that cut through the blinds. In the morning the four of them met at the Impala. While Dean reordered some of the things in the trunk, Young Dean asked Cas, “Where were you two last night?”

“I filled Past-Cas in on some details of the last twelve years,” said Cas.

Past-Cas stood at his side, looking distant and stony. For all that the billowy-shirt wardrobe and youthful face softened his outward appearance, the coldness of his expression won out. Young Dean didn’t think he’d be forgiven any time soon. It hurt a little, even if he deserved it, because he liked Past-Cas.

“You know more than I know,” Young Dean said to Past-Cas. “They hardly tell me anything.”

Past-Cas turned his gaze to Young Dean, the acute focus of it resting on him like a physical weight. Everything he’d heard about angels made them out to be emotionless robots by nature, too literal and pious to have room for feeling. That wasn’t what he saw in Past-Cas’ gaze, though. It was tragedy and doubt, it was yearning and regret, an intense metaphysical awareness alongside a shadow-form of desire. Young Dean wondered if the difference wasn’t that Past-Cas felt more, felt deeper, than Young Dean could even imagine.

“I don’t know which of us is better off for it,” Past-Cas said. He looked away again, chin lifting stiffly.

“We also visited a bookstore,” Cas said, eyes flicking to Dean as he closed the trunk of the Impala. “He finds the car confining and strange, which it is. I told him he’d one day find the creative endeavours of humans quite inspiring. _Pillars of the Earth_ should keep him busy. He’ll enjoy Ken Follett.”

“You’re such a freaking dad, Cas,” said Dean. He clapped a hand on Cas’ shoulder. “Come on, let’s move out.”

The sun was just rising, giving Past-Cas light to read by. He didn’t speak for the most part, voice raising only once to say, “This is very inaccurate sometimes.”

“Yes,” said Cas, more at ease with human error.

Past-Cas hummed, but, Young Dean noted, flipped the page with no lessening interest.

The sun warmed the car, and Young Dean tapped Cas’ shoulder to make him roll his window down. Dean played some good tapes, most of them ones that Young Dean remembered. He didn’t bother asking if there was any good music from this time to play. He rarely listened to anything newer than the 1970s in his own day.

By noon they were driving through the stop-and-go streets of Carmel-by-the-Sea, tracking down the address Jodi gave them. Dean pulled over and parked, squinting ahead at another charming, whimsical house in a town full of charming and whimsical houses. “Guess that’s the place,” he said.

“I can feel the warding from here,” said Cas.

“Being this close,” said Past-Cas, looking paler than Castiel. “I feel ill.”

“You two stay in the car with Teen-Dean till I can get in there and clear up the angel warding.”

“Why can’t I come?” Young Dean asked.

“Because I haven’t told Jody about you yet and she should hear about it first,” said Dean. “That, and I don’t know anything about this hunter she’s staying with. How’s that lady know anti-angel stuff, and what’s she hiding from? I want to suss it out. You’ll know when you can come in.”

Dean went to the door of the house, sizing the place up, wondering if it would kill this town to build something symmetrical. Half the cottages and shops in this town looked like if Dr. Seuss had had a Mediterranean architecture phase. He knocked on the front door and waited, casting a glance back to the car as if to assure himself nothing had happened in the thirty steps that brought him to the front door.

No answer. That wasn’t good. He went back down the three front steps, angling around the side of the house. Voices rose in easy dialogue, and when he recognised one as Jody’s he reached around the iron gate (good choice, he thought) to easily lift the latch and let himself in. He followed a sandy, flagstone path winding its way under lush tree branches.

“You made this salsa yourself? Is that mango?”

“I love the sweetness.”

“Donna and the girls would love this. I mean, Alex is a wimp when it comes to spice, but…”

“I won’t call it a crime if you halve the jalapeno, just don’t cut it out entirely.”

Dean emerged from around the corner of the house, spotting Jody sitting across from another woman, the pair of them dappled by the sun.

“Guess we’re not too worried about Sam, huh?” he said.

“Dean,” said Jody, slowly pulling herself from her chair. Standing, he saw that her face was bruised on the side that hadn’t faced him, a few butterfly bandages covering over cuts. She favoured her left leg when she stood up. “Figures you’d show up just when we took a break.”

The other woman stood too, her eyes taking Dean in curiously. She was a Black woman in her 50s, nearly Jody’s height, curvy and athletic with evenly buzzed salt-and-pepper hair.

“Dean Winchester,” she said. “I told myself I wouldn’t believe it till I’d seen it.”

“Dean, this is Essie Jones,” said Jody.

“Actually, we’ve met,” said Essie.

It took Dean a moment. He had to really dig. Dismissing old cases, old hunter contacts, till finally it came to him. “Essie the librarian,” he said. “Yeah. Yeah, actually. I remember you. That was, what, a million years ago?”

“I’m surprised you remember,” she said.

Dean gave a little shake of his head. “I’m surprised you do.”

“Well, mind like a steel trap, for starters,” Essie said. “That and you showed up on the FBI’s most wanted list not a decade later. And I thought, ‘Dean Winchester, he’s that sweet boy who brought his brother in with him. And wanted so badly to pay for that book.’”

Dean remembered the book. He usually tried not to. He’d avoided libraries for a solid year after that incident.

“But by then I was a hunter,” Essie continued. “So I knew there was more going on than what the police reports said.”

“You never told me you’d met Dean,” said Jody.

“Wanted to see him for myself,” said Essie. “You look a lot the same, actually.”

Dean cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. About that.” He was trying to find his feet again. He was used to life being strange sometimes, but in this moment it seemed to him that nothing had been weirder than encountering former librarians who remembered his fraught borrowing history in Carmel-by-the-Sea. “I didn’t come here alone.”

“Claire said you were travelling with Cas,” said Jody. If she looked a little uneasy it was because, Dean thought with a pang, she hadn’t actually met Cas yet. He was too often possessed or dead or tied up with something, and it wasn’t like they passed off Claire every other weekend. It was a complicated configuration, and not one he’d given enough thought to on the way down.

“Yeah,” said Dean. “Yeah, he can’t come in here ‘cause of the warding. But there’s more. We’ve got another angel with us too.”

“Another angel?” Jody asked. “You hate most of those guys.”

“Yeah well. You see this angel, he’s actually Cas? He’s a past version of Cas and he’s here in the present so we’re calling him Past-Cas just for, like, a pretense of sanity.”

Neither Essie nor Jody looked like they understood any of what Dean just said. He couldn’t exactly fault them. So he pressed on to tangle the web further.

“And the other guy we got with us is me. Young me. He also travelled here from the past. So we got Cas and me and Past-Cas and Teen-Dean.”

Jody raised her hands to her mouth, and even with half her face partly swollen Dean couldn’t mistake the thrill in her eyes.

“Don’t you dare try to adopt him, Jody,” he said.

“I’m making no promises,” she said, lowering her hands to her hips, barely biting back a smile. “If he’s a troubled teen I might not have any choice in the matter.”

Dean roughed a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “I did not think this through,” he said. He let out a breath, got ahold of himself, and said, “Essie, do you mind if we clear out some of your angel warding? Just for as long as Cas and Past-Cas are here.”

“Sure, sugar, but you’re going to have to tell me which is which. Come on inside.”

She led the way, offering Jody her arm, which Jody waved off as she limped in. Dean gave her a moment to get a few slow steps ahead.

He glanced at the table, looked around, then dipped one of the nacho chips in the homemade salsa. Oh. Jody was right, that was awesome. He stuffed two more in his mouth and followed the women inside.

He understood once he stepped inside why Essie said she’d need his help with the sigils. The wall of her front entrance might look to the untrained eye like some kind of arty accent piece. Running all over the desert tan wall were neat columns of sigils painted crisply in black. They were generally uniform in size, with a few of the more detailed, larger ones working tidily into the pattern. In some ways it wasn’t unlike what the Men of Letters had done to safeguard the bunker, running runes and sigils in even lines along the molding, but he’d never seen it incorporated so neatly into someone’s home before.

“Where’d you learn all this?” he asked.

“Books, obviously,” said Essie. “Whenever I found a new symbol, I’d test it out, then add it to the wall. I have room to expand, you see.”

“A lot of these aren’t commonly known,” said Dean. “Most hunters never even heard of angels.”

“I’m not too proud to admit I don’t know what _all_ of them do,” said Essie. “There were certainly some I hit a dead end with as to research. But my speciality is witches, and I always thought the more protection, the better. I didn’t even know I _was_ blocking out angels.”

“Some days it’s for the best,” said Dean.

“But not for your friend,” said Essie. “Which of these is the troublemaker?”

“Hold on,” he said. “I’m gonna need to call Cas.” He took out his phone and turned on the video for the call. It took an extra moment for Cas to answer, his face filling up most of the screen until he pulled the phone back to a comfortable arm’s length.

“Everything alright?” Cas asked.

“Yeah, we’re good,” said Dean. “Just need your—”

Young Dean’s voice interrupted over the line. “Whoa! What’s that?” He appeared just above Cas’ shoulder, arms hooked over the back of the seat as he leaned in. “No one told me this part. Dean, you hid all the cool future-stuff from me.”

Dean caught sight of Jody suppressing another smile. Teen-Dean’s younger voice and enthusiasm for the mundane was seriously cramping Dean’s image.

“He can see us, right?” said Young Dean. “Is that us down there?” He reached out and touched the phone’s screen. Dean was now looking at the dashboard of the Impala. “Uh oh. How do I get us back?”

“I don’t know,” Cas confessed.

Dean didn’t even know who he could blame for this. The image on his phone reverted to Young Dean and Cas. “Oh, did I fix it? I fixed it.” Young Dean pulled back his hand, leaning his chin on his arm.

“Just don’t touch anything,” said Dean. “Alright? Okay. Now, Cas, I got a whole hell of a lot of sigils here, and I’m gonna need your help finding the right ones. Alright, buddy?” He switched over the camera to face the wall, and when Cas gave the go-ahead, he moved the phone over the neat columns.

Dean could see Cas’ face, his brow furrowed at the small phone screen in concentration. Sometimes he’d say things like, “Oh! I haven’t seen that one in ages,” or, “Not likely to meet Nightmarchers here, but there’s no harm in it.” He finally spotted the first angelic sigil.

“Essie, it alright if I…” Dean took his Swiss Army Knife out of his pocket, gesturing with it apologetically.

“Do what you need to,” she said.

Dean scraped an ‘X’ through the marking on the wall.

“I felt that,” said Past-Cas, voice slightly less distinct over the line. “But there are still more.”

They repeated the process until Dean had crossed out five separate markings.

“That did it,” said Past-Cas with a sigh of relief.

All of a sudden, the two angels and Young Dean stood in the room with them. Past-Cas evidently still couldn’t see the purpose of walking short distances.

“You keep doing that,” Young Dean said, freeing his hand from Past-Cas’ and looking around himself. He gave an approving huff. “Nice spot,” he said. “You know, you guys could try this at the bunker. The windows, I mean.”

“Holy hell,” said Jody. “It really is Teen-You.”

Young Dean looked at her, fixing on a smile. “You’re Jody?”

“Yes,” said Jody. “Wow, this is. Yep. Definitely one of the stranger things to have happened.” She looked at the two angels now. “And you’re… both Cas. Well, it’s good to finally meet you.” She held out her hand to shake.

Past-Cas reached for it first, wrapping it in both of his own. In a flash of a moment her bruises disappeared, and she held her posture evenly again. He dropped her hand at once and wandered past her, more interested in the sigils on the wall than in interaction.

“Oh that felt good,” she said.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jody,” said Castiel, and he actually shook hands properly. Dean couldn’t help watching intently. He almost always had eye on Cas in some regard, but it felt more charged now than before. He wanted Jody and Cas to get along. Needed them to. The people he cared about in this world were limited, and relationships were rarely straightforward given the high-stakes game they played. Cas was unwittingly responsible for the death of Claire’s family and had even briefly existed in Claire, and Jody might hold it against him even if Claire didn’t any longer. To see them being perfectly polite, curious about one another but not guarded, eased something in him

“And this is our host, here,” said Dean. “Essie.”

Young Dean looked at her, channeling the same course of recognition Dean had gone through as he made sense of her slightly older features. “Essie the librarian?” he asked.

“You’ve met her already?” said Dean.

“Sure,” said Young Dean. He smiled at Essie. “You helped me with the computers last week. Or, like, twenty-some years ago.”

Essie’s dark, assiduous eyes kept going from one of the four men to another. “So, it’s all real,” she said. “I have a boy who’s time-travelled and two angels in my house.”

“If it helps,” said Past-Cas, leaning in to study a sigil while he spoke, “Castiel and I are really only one angel. Categorically speaking.”

“That’s a wonderful reassurance, thank you,” said Essie with kind sarcasm.

Past-Cas straightened and looked over his shoulder, appearing at once disoriented and sweetly pleased with himself. He gave a nod. “You’re welcome,” he said.

“Well now everybody knows who’s who,” said Dean. “How’s it going trying to track down Sam?”

“Let’s show him what we’ve worked out so far,” Jody said. “It’s a starting point, at least.”

Essie had a respectable library of her own, much of it indexed and carefully digitized. Sam had given Jody the bare bones of the griffin hunt without mentioning that they’d summoned Teen-Dean to do it. Evidently he thought that detail was best left for Dean to share, and Dean had to appreciate how deeply his brother knew him that he’d do that simple courtesy.

The six of them researched, though it was different, with having Past-Cas around. Anytime there was the suggestion of a lead, a place to check out, he zapped there with Dean to investigate. Most were cold trails, but at one spot they came across a dead Arimaspian and traces of sulphur, and another location showed signs of being rapidly abandoned. It didn’t bring them closer to Sam, but as Jody helpfully pointed out, the fact that they hadn’t found a trace of him pointed increasingly towards him being alive and unharmed. Whether he was out-strategizing his enemies or being held captive, though, they had no way of knowing yet.

When evening fell, Dean offered to help Essie with dinner, and enlisted Young Dean to help too. “The angels don’t eat,” he told Essie, “but we gotta make enough for six to account for this guy.”

He said it like Young Dean was only helping to earn his keep, but he must have known that it sated something else in him. Young Dean wanted to make good food and wanted to know how it was done. He also needed to be useful, being unaccustomed to leisure. He was used to shouldering responsibility and following orders.

He suspected Past-Cas felt the same. He’d been distant ever since Young Dean’s lie was revealed, and part of it might be betrayal. Young Dean had to bear the burden of guilt there. But it was something more, too. He came here believing he had a divine mission and that he would receive his orders upon arrival. When that hadn’t been the case, and when the purpose Young Dean brought him for had been thwarted by Sam and Essie’s angel-warding, he’d deflated further. Young Dean felt like he was killing Past-Cas by inches in bringing him to this confusing, complicated world.

Just before they went in to dinner, Young Dean watched Dean pull Jody aside. They were out of hearing, and Dean’s back was to him, but Young Dean understood it anyway. Something in Dean’s stilted posture, and in the attentive focus of Jody’s expression. Then the suspended, stuttering moment broke, and Jody was up on her toes, hugging Dean and saying something against the collar of his flannel. Both of them nodding, not letting go, till Jody eased back and left her hand on Dean’s arm.

He liked Jody, Young Dean decided. Hunters, then. They weren’t all John made them out to be.

* * *

Essie gave Young Dean a stack of sheets from the linen closet and sent him up to the attic. It had the feeling of a tiny garret, with a white, wrought-iron twin bed below a window through which he could see the waxing moon. The day had been warm, and the heat in the house rose up to the attic so that Young Dean found his excuse to open the window and breathe in the salt-tinged air of the Coast.

He made his bed with military corners, even though no one would come up here to check. He lay down in the moonlight, listening to the wind in the trees, arm stretched up above his head, and couldn’t find sleep.

On the lowest half-level of the house, Dean had been assigned a full-size daybed in what typically functioned as a living room. He lay awake, arm stretched up above his head. Essie’s house was quiet enough that he heard when footsteps passed by the open doorway. He knew that step anywhere. He’d even know it from Past-Cas.

“Cas, that you?” he called out.

Castiel circled back, stepping down into the living room. “Yes,” he said.

“You should come here,” said Dean. Not his smoothest line.

Cas didn’t seem to notice or mind that it wasn’t. He sat down on the edge of the daybed, hip against Dean’s thigh.

“Where’s Past-Cas?” Dean asked. “Not still reading _Pillars of the Earth_?”

“He’s in the garden,” said Cas. “I think he’s had his fill of people.”

“You ever get tired of us?”

“I think it used to overwhelm me on occasion,” said Cas. “There was so much I was trying to understand about you.”

They were quiet a moment, the silence filled by Dean’s thumb brushing against Cas’ knee. “I know you don’t need to sleep, but if you wanted…”

“I could sleep if I chose to,” said Cas. “Even if I don’t need it. Sleeping is underestimated as a social activity.”

“I didn’t ask for the essay,” said Dean.

“You didn’t ask for anything,” Cas pointed out.

Dean rolled his eyes plainly, and of course Cas broke into a smile at his exasperation. Dean didn’t take the sight of a smile from Cas for granted, but sometimes he thought only he knew how often they actually happened. “I could sleep,” Cas conceded.

“Okay, well, coat, off,” said Dean. “And the jacket. And the rest of it. Come on, man, sleeping in a button-up?” He relented when Cas was down to his undershirt and boxers. It was so much more skin than he ever got to see from Cas and it was sexy. It was absolutely sexy.

Cas had to clamber over Dean to get to the empty side of the bed. Dean’s preference was always closer to the door than the wall. Not for means of escape, but for offering his protection, even when there was no call to expect danger.

The bed wasn’t roomy, for two grown men. Dean didn’t mind that their bodies brushed as Cas settled in on his side, Cas’ knee knocking gently against his leg. He could feel Cas’ gaze on his profile and turned his head, studying Cas’ face in the low light. It took him a moment to bring his hand to Cas’ jaw, rubbing his thumb over the ridge of one cheekbone. Another to lean forward and find solace in a kiss that felt like sun on the blacktop, like the purr of an engine, like one favourite song after another. Like the sum of every good thing he’d known.

“Cas,” he said, when thinking got too much. 

Cas made a dreamy half-hum of inquiry. His lashes seemed almost too heavy to lift, though he raised his attention from Dean’s mouth to his eyes.

“I don’t know if you’re— I’m sure you’re expecting the whole… Dean Winchester Experience.” That had sounded absolutely moronic and Dean wished he could take it back, wished Cas would cut him off, but Cas was just nonchalantly waiting to see where Dean was going with this. “And I just, you know— it’s not— there’s a lot going on.”

“So you keep saying,” said Cas. “Are you in a hurry? I’m not.”

Dean gave a quick, simple shake of his head. “I’m not,” he said. This wasn’t something that was going to disappear tomorrow. Not on either side.

* * *

Young Dean went downstairs, not sure if he was thirsty or antsy or just too preoccupied. On his way to the kitchen he passed the doorway to the living room. He paused to look in, making out the two figures lying on the bed. Deeply asleep; incautiously so. Heads bowed towards one another, hands joined. Cas looked peaceful in his sleep. Gorgeous, Young Dean thought. He didn’t think Dean could fault him for acknowledging it.

He got a cup down from the kitchen cupboard, ready to get a glass of water just for something to do, when he noticed the billowy shirt caught in the moonlight outside. Past-Cas just sitting in the garden. And you know what? Probably not the only weirdo white man in California meditating in a dark garden at night. He was in good company here.

Young Dean left his glass on the counter and opened the patio door. It was chilly to be out in his bare feet, his boxers and his t-shirt, but there was still an echo of warmth in the flagstones. The grass was cool, though not quite dewy.

“Heya, Cas,” he said. It was just the two of them. They could use their own names.

Past-Cas finally looked away from the pale buds of a flowering manzanita. “Hello, Dean,” he said. It wasn’t what you’d call a welcome with open arms, but Young Dean had the impression that he probably led a lot of the way, when Castiel first arrived in their lives. He sat on the ground cross-legged, facing Past-Cas.

“You’re a flowers kind of guy, huh? I’ll have to tell Dean that. Make sure he remembers for birthdays and Valentine’s.”

“I don’t have a birthday,” said Past-Cas. “Not by your calendar.”

Young Dean rested one elbow on his knee, chin in hand. “Lucky you,” he said. “You get to pick the day.”

“I don’t think that’s how birthdays work,” said Past-Cas.

“Well you’ve never had one, so it’s not like you’re the expert on them.”

“I… don’t know why I bother arguing with you.”

“Just can’t resist me, I guess,” said Young Dean.

Past-Cas looked swiftly at the manzanitas again. Young Dean didn’t want to take it personally, but he couldn’t help it.

“What’s the matter with liking me anyway?” he asked. “There are worse crimes.”

“Not many,” said Past-Cas, voice quiet and grave. “Considering all I do for you.” Young Dean didn’t know the details of all Castiel had been through, but they talked about it so seriously. Past-Cas’ gaze turned more distant and more unseeing. “Considering what I’ve already done.”

“Cas…”

“You lied to me,” said Past-Cas. “Castiel tells me you have a good heart and that you are an honourable man. Righteous. And yet you are a deceiver.”

“I’m sorry, Cas,” said Dean. “I’ve been sorry this whole time, ever since we got here.”

“Ever since Castiel exposed your lie,” said Past-Cas. “Only since then.”

“I guess I can’t expect you to understand it all,” said Young Dean.

Past-Cas lifted his eyes, his gaze penetrating. “I can’t let you have the comfort of believing that when we both know it isn’t true,” said Past-Cas. “You’re going to have to do better.”

Young Dean turned his head away, holding back the painful shiver from his own chest. Past-Cas knew how to strike where the guilt was hot. He couldn’t pretend he was in the right: he knew it under his skin. He always had.

“Cas, I’m _sorry_. It’s not something I say a lot, but I mean it. I hate that you don’t like me because I’m kind of crazy about you, and _that’s_ honesty. But I got kind of crazy about the future, too. It was like I couldn’t focus on anything else, and I was willing to do anything to come back. I thought it didn’t matter what dumb thing I did to get here. We could fix it, fix anything. And save the day and have a good time and never fuck up again. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t say ‘fuck’ around you. You’re a holy angel of God or whatever and that’s probably offensive.”

“It’s among the least offensive things I’ve heard,” said Past-Cas. He paused for a moment, thought out his words, then said, “It’s considerate of you to ask.”

“I’m sorry you’re stuck here, too,” said Young Dean. “I can tell you’re unhappy.”

Past-Cas pressed his lips briefly, eyes narrowing as he tipped his head up towards the sky. “I am a soldier,” he said. “I am accustomed to being useful and following directions. Being part of a larger plan. This… this feels like chaos to me. My orders were lies and have now evaporated. The purpose for which I was brought I cannot execute. And it seems such a paltry quest: I have fought in heavenly battles with cosmic consequences, and yet I cannot find one man in one relatively contained landmass.”

“That’s not your fault,” said Young Dean. He rubbed a hand against the gooseflesh on his forearm. “I didn’t know enough when I asked you to come. I didn’t know that Sam would be hidden from you.” He shivered and pulled one knee up against his chest to contain his warmth.

“You are cold?” Past-Cas asked. He tilted his head to a curious angle.

“A little,” said Young Dean. “But I don’t want to go inside yet.”

Past-Cas touched his bare knee. Young Dean felt warm all through, as if the chill had never been there. “That should last a little.”

“Where you been all my life, Cas?” he said. Thinking of cold nights sleeping in the car when they were too far from a motel or just didn’t have the money, shivering so hard and so long that he woke up with his hips and shoulders aching, but didn’t dare complain about it.

“Heaven,” Past-Cas said. “Or were you being… Castiel said that sometimes you are flirtatious.”

Young Dean laughed outright at that. “You mean you hadn’t noticed? Angel, I must not be doing my job right.”

“There is one thing that confuses me,” said Past-Cas. (Young Dean, to his immense credit, did not ask ‘ _Just one?_ ’) “Castiel explained many things to me, but he left this out. The lifespan of a human is not long. Is twelve years not a considerable time for courting?”

Young Dean looked at the grass with a stupid smile. The angel called it courting. That was the sweetest and dorkiest thing he’d ever heard.

“You’re not wrong,” he said, plucking a few blades of grass from the ground, rubbing them between his fingers and thumb. “But some people are a little slow on the uptake. I’m not what you’d call smart.”

“That’s not true,” said Past-Cas. So simply that it brokered no room for argument.

“I mean that I got a lot of baggage,” Young Dean said instead. Past-Cas’ careful glance around said he was considering that too literally. “As in, you know, emotional baggage.”

“Ah,” said Past-Cas. “You require an emotional valet.”

Young Dean barked a laugh. “Yeah, well, _he_ does, maybe. Future me. He’s a mess. I’m the balanced one.”

“It’s okay if you aren’t,” said Past-Cas. “It doesn’t matter to… to Castiel.” His brow furrowed over these careful words. “He loves you either way.”

“He loves me?” Young Dean asked. He didn’t know who he was talking about. His current self. His future self. Cas. Past-Cas. They were all separate and they were all one and Young Dean could hardly untangle it any more.

“He told me that looking at you feels more like home than Heaven ever was.”

Young Dean thought he’d be ready for it, hungry to be told of being loved. At first it seemed novel and hopeful and comforting. But it was also a harrowing ache. It was beyond what he could process. His brain was mostly just static, so he let himself slump to the ground, stretching out to lie and looking up blankly at the stars.

Cas loved him a hell of a lot. Young Dean pressed his eyes closed. He hoped that Dean knew.

He felt Past-Cas lie down beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder.

“Three of my favourites are visible at this turn of the earth,” said Past-Cas. He raised an arm and pointed to the sky. “There, there, and there.” Young Dean had no idea of which he’d picked out amongst the vast array above them, but he believed that Past-Cas was right and they were, objectively, the best of stars. “I’m not supposed to have favourites,” said Past-Cas. “I’d say it’s one of the lesser of my sins, all things told, but perhaps it was an indicator.”

Young Dean shifted. He rested his head against Past-Cas’ stomach, lying at right angles now. His skin still felt the unnatural warmth from Past-Cas’ touch. It felt strange to sense the cool grass, the chill in the night air, and yet need no cure for it.

“Cas?” he said. “I know you may need time to come around to me. And I know I’m not him yet, the one you’ll eventually want. The one you’ll live and fight and die for. But I just, uh… I just want you to know that if this was really how we met, I mean if this was what either of us got to remember, I wouldn’t need to wait twelve years.”

“It is fitting,” said Past-Cas. In a natural movement lacking his usual angelic restraint, his fingers threaded through Young Dean’s hair. “Neither would I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » Cas is a Ken Follett/Patrick O’Brian/Bernard Cornwell Dad. Dean should not criticize him, though, as he is a _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ Dad. “books you would find in the back of your dad’s car” is among my favourite of the Forgotten Genres.  
> » this update comes really soon after the last because I really wanted to share it with you. however this does likely mean a longer wait for the next. but say it with me kids, the one thing we've learned from these fics: Time Isn't Real  
> » ch. 4 title reference: “The Terrifying Angel” by Miklós Radnóti


	5. slouching towards bethlehem

Young Dean awoke in his garret bed, though he didn’t remember leaving the garden. Had he climbed to the attic himself, or had he fallen asleep on the grass, head pillowed against Past-Cas’ stomach? It would mean Past-Cas transported him here. He could do it with a touch, as easy as breathing, but the fact he could do it without Young Dean even noticing was what surprised him.

He came downstairs rubbing sleep from his eyes. He took in a deep breath, passing by an open window on the staircase. Outside, the wind was gradually picking up, brushing through the tops of the trees. It moved East-to-West, towards the sea. Warm and dry, ratcheting the temperature up by a few degrees even at this early hour of the day. There was something about the way the wind blew downward through the window, depressing his senses, that made him feel out of sorts. Or perhaps it was only the strange night he’d passed that felt increasingly like a dream.

Essie burned the eggs that morning and blamed the devil winds.

“It’s the Santa Ana winds south of us. It’s not good for the supernatural,” she said, emptying the scorched contents of her pan into the trash. “People who _don’t_ drink blood or grow talons get strange during the Santa Ana. Every hunter roundabout these parts is arming up with silver, salt, and holy water. Mark my words, there will be trouble tonight.”

They had a simple breakfast of cereal, fruit, toast, and then scattered through the house with Essie’s library books to continue their research. They had an early breakthrough, an email from one of Essie’s contacts passing on intel about some credible rumours that the Arimaspoi had some sort of compound in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

“Where am I taking us?” Past-Cas asked.

“There aren’t exactly coordinates here,” said Essie. “There will be markings, like guideposts for other Arimaspians. Like this.” She pointed to her laptop screen, displaying five different, roughly drawn marks. “They could be carved into stones or trees.”

“Looks like we’ll have to hit the road,” said Dean, not that he seemed to mind. He felt in control behind the wheel of his car, and would rather be out doing things than stuck inside researching.

“Hooray,” said Past-Cas in a dull, deep tone. “The car again.”

Essie and Jody agreed to stay behind, seeing if they could make any further progress. It would be a full car again, with two Deans and two Castiels, but they wanted Past-Cas for his power, Dean wasn’t going anywhere without Cas, and they couldn’t leave Young Dean unattended.

Already the temperature was in the low seventies. Young Dean, who hadn’t packed a bag for this trip, had been given some of the clothes that Essie’s son Simon left when he went off to Yale. A cherry red t-shirt, a fresh pair of dark jeans. She printed off pages with the symbols they’d look for, too, and Young Dean had the impression of being sent off with everything short of a packed lunch. He wasn’t used to that kind of minding from someone else.

They met slow traffic trying to get out of town. More horns sounding, more sirens, wind blowing up dust and trash. It was better on the highways and hill roads. They navigated by a crisp road map in Cas’ lap, the way that Young Dean was used to. In this instance it gave them more routes to try, better paths to plan. It was slow going, as the main roads seemed too obvious and open to be marked with signs. Instead they stopped at gates marked with ‘No Trespassing’ or questionable ‘Closed Road’ signs, investigating on foot or by removing the barricade to see if some hint of Arimaspian presence lurked beyond. Even with Past-Cas to fly up ahead and poke around the less accessible spots, they didn’t meet much luck.

They drove back down towards the coast in the early afternoon to have a late lunch. Everything was overpriced and self-consciously rustic, but the setting couldn’t have been better. Mountains directly behind them, sea directly ahead. As they waited for their order, Young Dean wandered to the edge of the gravel parking lot for a better view out.

“You brought me here in a dream,” said Past-Cas, coming to stand by Young Dean’s elbow.

“You asked if it was Heaven to me,” said Young Dean.

“Your memory of it was very detailed,” said Past-Cas. “You recalled the smell of baked earth and sea air and all the growing, living things.”

“Dean says I don’t like it so much in the future,” said Young Dean. He glanced back at the Impala, where Dean drummed his hands idly against the rooftop while engaging in some easy, and likely case-related, back-and-forth with Cas. “He says since Sam went to college in Palo Alto, he started avoiding Southern California.”

“But you still like it here,” said Past-Cas.

“I don’t know any more,” said Young Dean. “Yes. And no. It’s like he soured me on it.”

“Come with me,” said Past-Cas. His hand brushed Young Dean’s arm as he started away, crossing the two-lane highway so that they could reach a better look-out point. There were rough steps built into the path, winding down a few yards closer to the sea. He found a shaded spot to sit, gesturing for Young Dean to join him.

They were out of sight of Dean and Cas, here. Out of sight of cars and people, too, and all at once that old dream didn’t seem so far off.

“Your senses weren’t the only details you brought to that dream,” said Past-Cas, gaze ever-fixed on Young Dean, who looked out at the endless stretch of blue ocean ahead. “You brought feelings as well. They were unusual to me, but not unpleasant. You felt… liberation.” He said the word carefully, as if it were new to him. Like he had deliberated over the meaning for some time, seeking out exact expressions for things he had never felt. “Independence. You were happy, not as a burst of joy, but like an enduring pulse, like a heartbeat. You were calm. Yet the scope of the sea with its vastness and the altitude of the cliff brought a dizzy whiff of adrenaline. You liked your own insignificance, because the world was not on your shoulders.”

Young Dean took in a deep breath, wanting to refute that he could feel all of that at once. Past-Cas was over-analysing it, giving him too much credit. But was anything he said wrong? Young Dean shut his mouth again.

“It was an exquisite admixture of ideas and sensations and root feelings,” said Past-Cas. “Complicated. Immaculate. Unapologetic. So raw and bare and pure that even one of Heaven’s angels had to struggle not to give over to it.”

Young Dean felt as if Past-Cas reached into his chest, wrapped a hand around his heart, and pressed it tight. Yet when he looked at that face it was straight and almost impassive, if not for an earnest gleam of idealism in those blue eyes. Something begging to be heard and understood.

“I didn’t know I was feeling all that,” Young Dean said. “I didn’t know you could, too. I would’ve stopped if I knew.”

Past-Cas shook his head. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to,” he said. He turned his face towards the water again, pointing out, the wind catching in his hair and in his billowy shirt. “Do you truly look out and sense none of that now?” he asked. He asked with the curiosity of a scientist. Outside Young Dean’s head, he couldn’t borrow feelings and untangle the strange cocktail of emotions.

Young Dean wrapped his arms around his knees, trying to summon up the old memory. Then trying to forget the old memory, forget all the rest, and think about what being here meant. The taste of the air and the dark wildness of the ocean and the sense that the world and time stretched out forever to some place beyond. But it wasn’t so straightforward.

“I know it’ll change, now,” said Young Dean. “I know I can’t stop it changing.”

“Your brother hasn’t left you, yet,” said Past-Cas. “You don’t have Dean’s feelings about Southern California. And yet by being made aware of the impermanence of your happiness, you have become unhappy. Even what brings you joy brings you sorrow because you know it will end. Buddhists have a name for it: viparinama-dukkha. It’s one of the forms of suffering. Every happiness is coloured with the knowledge it cannot last.”

Past-Cas squinted out at the water. “I don’t understand it perfectly. All things in your human life are impermanent. Even that star you call the Sun will one day expire. Why should this surprise you?” He canted his head to one side. “But then I thought: I know it too. Castiel told me that this time will be taken from me, these memories of you and him and the future world. It should not bother me. This is only a nonlinear blip in the course of my existence. Yet it did. It does. Reflecting as to why, I realise it is because in certain moments over these past few days I have felt happy, but was too unhappy in my awareness of it ending to understand it.”

“When were you happy?” Young Dean asked.

“That would be telling,” said Past-Cas.

Young Dean bumped his arm against the angel’s. “Oh come on, you tease,” he said. “You make a big speech and then clam up? How’s that fair?”

“You’ve never played fair,” said Past-Cas. “I learned from the best.”

That made Young Dean laugh, grinning and shaking his head, and Past-Cas smiled at eliciting that reaction. He looked so good with a smile, Young Dean thought.

Dean caught sight of them after they’d crossed the road, disappearing down the path and out of sight. He started to follow, frowning.

Cas caught his sleeve. “Give them a moment,” he said.

“What’s he need a moment for?” Dean asked. “I’m telling you, I can’t be trusted.”

Cas barely contained his amusement. His hand dropped down to Dean’s wrist, still holding him in place so he wouldn’t charge after their younger selves. “I thought you’d be tired of keeping an eye on him. They’re probably just taking in the view.”

“That what the kids are calling it these days?” Dean asked.

“It’s a very striking part of the country,” said Cas.

Dean’s mouth twisted, considering it for a long moment. Taking in what he could see of the ocean, the trees, all gilded by brilliant rays of light. At this time of day the sun was still high, yet it shone onto the Western face of the land, slowly preparing to set over the ocean. It was a rare, golden kind of light that reshaped the world, made it stirring and mythical. Here especially, under the warm, dry winds, it left him with the nebulous feeling of a fever-dream.

“I used to like coming out here,” he admitted. California was the conclusion of a road trip, the place to rest your feet and let go of the ideas of destination or direction for a while. It meant owing nothing else to himself or anyone. Of course, that had never quite been true. There was always another hunt waiting, another adversity to overcome. Always someone who needed him to come back, who needed his time or his fists or his faithful obedience. Yet somehow, in a few spare moments in the past, he’d let himself believe he was free.

He couldn’t trick himself into thinking that now. But he could give Young Dean a chance.

He gave them till the food was ready. He brought it down with him to Young Dean and Past-Cas, talking himself into sitting down and actually noticing that it was kind of nice, really. He had to take off his outer shirt, getting too warm for layers. It might be in the high seventies now, with the warm devil winds still blowing. Maybe that was part of what made him uneasy about leaving Young Dean and Past-Cas alone. These winds made people do strange things.

They finished eating and took a call from Jody. Little progress on either side, but Dean had to keep hoping that they’d find something soon. When he hung up, although they were all ready to go, he looked at the angels and said, “Why don’t you two go on to the car? I gotta talk to Teen-Dean for a sec.”

Dean pointedly ignored Cas’ curious expression, and Young Dean watched them depart.

“What is it now, _Dad_?” Young Dean asked with a uniquely teenaged sneer.

“Knock it off,” said Dean.

“Knock what off?”

“Your attitude, for one.”

“It’s _your_ attitude!” said Young Dean. “You are so much crabbier than I am.”

“That’s because I have to put up with you,” said Dean. It was quickly turning into one of their circuitous arguments, the ones they usually needed someone else’s interference to escape.

Young Dean stood up with a shake of his head. “Whatever, man. I’m going to the car.”

“Stop,” said Dean. “I really did have something to say.”

Young Dean didn’t look thrilled, but at this age he still followed orders. He stopped and turned to face Dean again, but kept silent.

“Look,” said Dean. “Whatever you got going with Past-Cas, you gotta cool it.”

“What’s it matter to you?”

“I just mean… I’m sure you have lots of fun and exciting new feelings going on. You’re still all dumb and full of teenage hormones.” He gestured vaguely with a hand. “But you can’t touch him. You understand?”

“Oh boy, we’re really doing this,” said Young Dean. He laughed bitterly, resting his hands on his hips and turning out to face the water. He narrowed his eyes against the bright sun and shook his head. “You possessive son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “You think you get to call those shots?”

“I have to,” said Dean. “I’m putting my foot down.”

“No way,” said Young Dean. “You’re such a damn head case. Getting all precious about what’s yours, what’s real, when things should happen. Guess what, Dean. I’m real too. You call me Teen-Dean like I’m something less-than, something made-up. But you were the one who said in Reno that we weren’t two separate people. I only count as you when it suits.”

“Kid, it’s not that,” said Dean.

“Just ‘cause you’re too damaged to give yourself what you want doesn’t mean I have to be,” said Young Dean. “If he gives me a sign, then why shouldn’t I? We aren’t taking anything away from you by doing it.”

“Would you shut up for a second?” Dean asked. “Just stow your bullshit and listen to me. I’m not being some petty piece of shit, here, I’m trying to say you can’t touch him, because that isn’t Cas.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“There’s a person under there,” said Dean. “This… This Lawry Novak guy said ‘yes’ to being Cas’ vessel, but he’s still in there, and that’s his body that Past-Cas is using. We’re dragging him through time and all across Southern California in this slipshod mission. It’s already more than he signed up for. Past-Cas might not understand it. Using a vessel is just about practicality to him. Which is why I need you to understand. You look at him and you see Castiel, but underneath there’s a guy who has no choice about what’s happening to him.”

That silenced Young Dean, as Dean knew it would.

“I didn’t realise that’s what it would mean,” said Young Dean. The fight disappeared from his words at once, leaving his voice suddenly hollow. “You and Cas, though…”

“It’s different,” said Dean. “He’s died and been remade so many times. Jimmy’s soul is in Heaven, has been for years. I think… this is just how Cas kinda looks now.”

“I didn’t understand how vessels work,” said Young Dean.

“We don’t even know if Lawry will survive this,” Dean said. “Hosting an angel ain’t easy, even if the bloodline’s right.”

“So you’re saying I’ve already got his blood on my hands. On top of everything else.”

“I’m not saying anything for sure,” said Dean. “Maybe he really did die in a car accident. But I can’t say I like the timing of it all.”

“Okay,” said Young Dean. He rubbed his hand against his cheek. That hot wind ruffled through his hair and left him feeling oddly empty. He felt like a piece of himself was missing. “Nothing will happen. I wouldn’t put anyone through that.”

“I know,” said Dean.  


* * *

  
The sun sat low and orange above the ocean. It was still unseasonably warm, persistently windy. Heat radiated from Baby’s black paint where Dean rested his arm out of the driver’s side window. The day was nearly spent. After sundown, they wouldn’t have much luck spotting the guide-marks they were looking for. Already the shadows grew long and made their task harder.

Cas recorded every road they took in thick black marker on the local map, and there were more routes to try, but Dean had been convinced they’d find something today. Sam had been gone too long already, and while he was certainly a survivor, Dean needed to know where he was. Needed to know he was safe.

Dusty wind blew through the open windows of the car as they headed north again. All day it had been pushing against the sides of the vehicle, but Dean kept her easily on course. He tapped his thumb against the steering wheel a few times, trying to fidget his way past the antsy feeling crawling over his bones. He wet his lips, a deep uneasiness sinking through him that he couldn’t explain.

“Cas,” Young Dean’s voice said weakly from the back. “Roll up your window. Please roll up your window.”

It was the right idea. It was essential, actually. Dean reached down to crank up his window too. The uneasiness in his chest rose higher. He wanted to shift out of his skin. Like the blood in his veins had decided to start running the opposite direction. He glanced towards Young Dean, gaze briefly passing over the hills visible through the passenger side.

He looked swiftly to the road again. He let out a careful breath.

“What’s the matter?” Castiel asked, although he’d rolled up his window politely at Young Dean’s request. “What’s gotten into you two?”

“Don’t look at them,” Dean said quickly. It was the only thing he knew. Keep his foot steady on the gas and don’t look at the Dark Watchers.

“I saw five of them, at least,” said Young Dean, breath shallow.

“Five of what?” asked Cas, looking out the window.

“No!” said Young Dean. He surged forward, hands reaching around to cover up Cas’ eyes. It was the fastest way he had of responding, unthinking. “Don’t look at them. They don’t want you to look.”

“I don’t see anything,” said Past-Cas, craning past Young Dean and lowering his head to squint out his window. Meanwhile, Castiel inelegantly pulled away from Young Dean’s hands.

“I’ve never seen you scared like this,” said Cas. “Of… of nothing. There’s nothing out there. Is this a prank?”

Dean shook his head, answered with quick, clipped words. “I’m not scared. We’re just not interacting. We’re going about our business.” He wanted desperately to be further on, past the mountains, back in Carmel. Still, he didn’t speed up. Like passing an angry dog, the trick was not to stop and not to run.

“There’s more of them,” said Young Dean, even though he wouldn’t look directly. He stared straight ahead at the road, shoulders tight, sweat at the collar of his t-shirt.

“What are you talking about?” Castiel demanded.

“They’re Dark Watchers,” said Young Dean. “If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.”

“I’ve mostly just heard of them,” said Dean. “Thought I saw one, once, when I was seventeen. Seven feet tall, maybe more. Black cloak. Some kind of brimmed hat. No face.”

“They’re in the hills,” said Young Dean. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, looking pasty. He bowed his head and raked his hands through his hair. “There’s so many of them. There usually aren’t this many. They don’t want us here.”

“How do you know that?” asked Castiel, peering out the window again. “I don’t see _anything_.”

“You can just _feel_ it, Cas,” said Young Dean. The dread made him sink lower, and made Dean’s knuckles turn white on the wheel. He just had to get past the mountains, past this range, and then he wouldn’t feel these harrow-waves of ill-intent. Some frequency beyond hearing, but dammit he could feel it in his teeth. He fared better than Young Dean only because he had something to focus on, something other than the sense of menace burrowing under his marrow, scraping his bones.

“This is a party trick,” said Past-Cas confidently, still completely missing the nuance of the term. “You say they are in those hills? I’ll be right back.” He disappeared from the car.

“No, Cas!” Young Dean sat up, reaching for Dean’s shoulder. “Pull over the car.”

Dean did what he said, responding to the urgency without asking for Young Dean’s game plan. The tires hadn’t even come to a full stop before the door was open, Young Dean’s shoes hitting the dirt and tearing off into the hills.

Past-Cas, the idiot, stood at the crest of one ridge, surveying the area like he’d opened the casing, inspecting the world as he would the inner workings of a clock. He did not see the Dark Watchers descending towards him, closing in.

“Cas!” shouted Young Dean, scrambling up through rock and brush, using his hands as often as his feet to climb higher ahead. The Watchers turned their faceless forms to him. He felt like his chest would cave in under the force of their malevolence.

“There are no monsters here,” said Past-Cas. “There are no souls of any kind.”

“Cas, they’re all around you,” shouted Young Dean, still too far away.

The Dark Watchers began to move again. This time towards Young Dean.

They did not step or glide. Young Dean couldn’t say by what mechanism they moved, only that they pressed ever closer. He began to scramble backward, never taking his eyes from the Watchers because to give up attention for even a moment would be fatal. He stumbled in the dirt but never stopped moving, unable to look behind him. Dust covered his jeans and shoes and hands.

“Cas,” he begged. “Cas, help me. Get us to the car.” He lost his footing, shoe slipping over the edge of a small crag. He tumbled into the dirt sure that he was done for, that it was all the time needed for the Watchers to reach him. He curled in on himself as the black hand of the closest Watcher extended toward him.

In a moment arms wrapped around him, and in the next he and Past-Cas were crashing in a heap onto the backseat of the Impala.

Dean jumped at their sudden presence, his hand tightly gripping the sleeve of Castiel’s coat as a means of keeping him in the car.

“I think we should go,” said Past-Cas.

Dean’s hand went to the gear shift, his foot lifting from the brake. Then he looked out the front window and stopped.

“Teen-Dean seemed very concerned,” said Past-Cas. “We should go,” he repeated.

Young Dean lifted his head from where it had been buried in Past-Cas’ shoulder. He saw what Dean did. What the angels couldn’t. A Dark Watcher stood directly in front of the Impala. Seven-feet tall, featureless, standing straight, yet braced on a long black staff. It had no more definition than a shadow, yet it took up physical space, like the negative form of a person. Void instead of presence.

“It wants us to go with it,” said Dean.

“What does?” Castiel asked, glancing out the front window, looking to the right of where the Watcher stood. “Is it _speaking_ to you, Dean?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know,” said Dean. “It says it knows what we’re looking for. It says the angels can come.”

“Oh good. It can see us but we can’t see it,” said Castiel. “Dean, we are not going with these… these Dark Watchers that only you and Teen-Dean can see.”

“We are if it helps us find Sam,” said Dean, reaching for the handle of his door. He stepped out of the car. Teen-Dean unfurled from his place against Past-Cas in the back seat. He circled the car to stand at Dean’s side, shoulder-to-shoulder. The rest of the Dark Watchers dotted the hills, further from the road.

“This is insanity,” Cas muttered as he got out, looking around at the perfectly normal scenery of the California coastal road at twilight. Past-Cas joined him. Dean and Teen-Dean stood silently. Dean nodded at something.

“You’re going to have to fill us in,” Cas said.

“It says that the Dark Watchers are hungry,” said Young Dean. “But they will not feast on us if we will help them.”

“So,” said Cas. “I take it we’re helping them.”

“They want the Arimaspoi removed,” said Young Dean. “They’ve encroached on their land. It says we cannot trust the Arimaspoi.”

“That’s obvious,” growled Dean. “Or Sam wouldn’t be missing.”

“It says it can guide us to the secret houses of this infestation,” said Young Dean. “That’s their words. It also says it can hear me repeating everything it says out loud and that it’s very annoying.”

“Why don’t we see it?” Past-Cas asked. “Why do I sense nothing?”

“There’s nothing to sense,” said Young Dean. “The Dark Watchers are absence. Angels have not even known what they have not known. That’s their words, again.”

“You think we can trust it?” Castiel asked.

“It can hear you,” Young Dean mentioned.

“Well right now we want the same thing,” said Dean. “To burn those Arimasp-holes to the ground. We’re doing this.”

The Dark Watcher’s arm extended out, pointing inland. Dean nodded again. The figure receded, the motion of its departure like that of merging shadows, indistinct and difficult to place.

“It told us where to find them,” said Dean. “They’ll leave us to finish our task tonight.”

“Which is good,” said Young Dean tersely, holding an arm over his stomach. “Because when they’re near us I feel like I’m gonna fucking die. You feel that, Dean?”

“Like I couldn’t breathe,” said Dean. He didn’t look at the hills as the figures slowly disappeared, only knew their departure by the lessening pressure in his head. “Like everything in the world wanted me dead. Me included.”

“Yeah, like that,” said Young Dean.

“That sounds terrible,” said Castiel. “Why are we helping them again?”

“They’re helping us,” said Dean. “Besides, we got no idea how to gank them, and at this point? I don’t want to get them mad.”

“Did they say that Sam is here?”

“It didn’t have an answer for that,” said Dean. “I don’t think it knew either way.”

“You understand that this ranks among your least wise decisions?”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“As long as we’re on the same page,” said Cas. “Let’s help the monsters with their monster problems. What could go wrong?”  


* * *

  
Twilight hurried into darkness as Dean drove up into the mountains, now on the fastest route to the reported hideaway. Cas hooked an arm over the back of the Impala’s front seat to fill in more on the Arimaspoi.

“This wasn’t particularly relevant when you were hunting for the griffin,” Cas explained to Young Dean. “So we didn’t give you all of the background.”

“You did not tell me much of these Arimaspians either, in your summary of the passing years,” said Past-Cas.

“There was, you recall, quite a lot to cover,” Castiel said.

“Last time I walked the Earth, these monsters inhabited only the Outer Carpathians,” said Past-Cas. “Or so I heard.”

“Yes. Some centuries ago they migrated to this continent and, it appears, preferred the warmer climes of California to those they’d known. Not so the griffins they brought with them. They quickly lost control of the griffins, which spread mostly North through the Rockies. We suspect the reason they wanted an egg was to rear and tame a griffin again. I don’t know that it would have worked out for them.”

“I almost forgot about that egg,” said Young Dean. “And it’s the whole reason I came here. Do you think Sam still has it?”

“We haven’t seen evidence of the box, or of the egg’s destruction,” said Cas. “Perhaps when we reach their base, we will find some answers.”

“And what are we expecting at the base?” said Young Dean. “What’s our game plan? How many Arimaspoi will be there? I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t thinking strategy at _all_ when those Dark Watchers were around. I would’ve agreed to anything to get them away.”

“Yeah, man, same,” said Dean. “Here’s what I figure we do. I’ll go in alone first—”

“Dean,” said Cas. “You aren’t going alone. I’ll go with you.”

“You should take Past-Cas,” said Young Dean. “He can zap you out if things go sideways in there.”

“He has a point,” said Castiel.

Dean looked at Past-Cas in the rear-view mirror. “If we do that, you gotta follow my lead, okay?” he asked. “I remember working cases with you in the old days, when you were new. Sometimes looking after you was a job in itself.”

Past-Cas frowned at Dean in the mirror in distinctly the same way that Castiel frowned from the front seat.

Dean glanced at Cas, at the mirror, then at Cas again. “What?”

“Hmmm,” said Cas.

Young Dean cackled from the back seat. “Oooh. I’d say you’re not getting laid tonight, but you aren’t anyway, so—” He cut himself off, smile freezing and fading when the three faces rounded on him and he realised he _really_ didn’t think before talking.

“Teen-Dean,” warned Dean through gritted teeth.

“That, uh. I think that managed to offend everybody,” said Young Dean, looking between them, looking last at Past-Cas whose brow remained furrowed. “A three-for-one,” he said. He could still feel Dean’s glare through the rear-view mirror. “Call that a hat-trick.”

“How good that you two are communicating more,” said Cas.

“So this mission,” Young Dean said loudly. “What happens once you’re in?”

“Well first,” said Dean, shooting one last glare back at Young Dean, “we negotiate. Find out where Sam is. If he’s here, we get him out. Second, we burn the place down.”

“We are not starting wildfires in California, Dean,” said Cas. “Most especially with these winds the way they are.”

“I saw you had hand grenades in the back,” said Young Dean. “We could just demo the place.”

“We could do that,” said Dean. He brightened up a bit, getting an excited look in his eye as he glanced back. “Sam never okays the grenades.”

“What a killjoy,” said Young Dean. “Why have them and not use them?”

“You get it, man,” said Dean. “It’s like, what problems _can’t_ they solve?”

“They are joking, aren’t they?” Past-Cas asked.

“I’ve known him long enough not to have that hope,” long-suffering Castiel answered.

The car crept through pitch-dark forest, headlights at last illuminating the markings they’d been looking for all day. There they were, etched into trees and stones and painted obliquely onto road signs. They led to an entryway built into the side of a mountain. Corrugated steel sheets, rusted and graffitied, made for a doorway, marked as ‘Danger Due To: Asbestos Waste Material.’ However, the door also bore every marking they’d been searching for mixed in with the various graffiti tags.

Dean was packing guns and ammo, which he would’ve felt naked without, but couldn’t easily disguise grenades about his person. He briefly eyed Young Dean’s jean jacket, but it wouldn’t serve. He’d fill it out too much now. “Cas,” he said. “You could give Past-Cas your coat? We can hide a few things in there.”

It wasn’t a bad plan, but he regretted the suggestion almost immediately. Past-Cas, looking all of twenty and still in his half-fastened button-up and jeans, shook the lapels of the tan trench coat to straighten the way it fell on him. His face, so young and severe, reminded Dean all too much of the first time he laid eyes on Cas and that was very… confusing.

Cas noticed, watching Dean with a canny look. “You know,” he said to Dean. “He’s much too old for you.”

Dean responded with a flat expression, patently trying not to be amused.

Young Dean walked by them making a fake retching sound. “Ugh, the goo-goo eyes around here are killing me,” he said.

“That smart mouth is gonna land you in trouble,” Dean said.

“I can only hope,” said Young Dean. He sat on the edge of the Impala’s hood, arms folded. “Instead I get _boring_. ‘Stay by the car, Teen-Dean.’ ‘Don’t touch the grenades, Teen-Dean.’ ‘I saw that, Teen-Dean, put it back.’ A guy can’t have any fun these days.”

“A guy shouldn’t try to get his kicks time travelling, then,” said Dean. He gave Past-Cas a few more grenades to hide in his coat before pronouncing them ready. Past-Cas pulled aside the sheeting for Dean to lead the way inside the compound, then both disappeared.

Young Dean checked over a couple guns, ready to pop off rogue Arimaspians if it came to that kind of fight. Cas leaned against the car next to him, watching the entrance.

“Seems like we’ve barely talked, Cas,” said Young Dean. He sighted down the handgun, aiming it at a knot in a tree branch. He didn’t touch the trigger, but shadowed out the movement of firing, of the kickback from the gun. A bulls-eye. He’d always been a good shot.

“You appeared to be more interested in the younger model,” said Castiel, arms loosely folded, gaze ever on the uninviting entranceway.

“Oh don’t take it like that, now,” said Young Dean. “For one, I don’t like you any less. For another, I get so confused when there’s two of you. But you’re the original Cas, to me.”

“I suspect he’s refreshing in some ways,” said Cas. “It’s more even. He doesn’t have a history with you the way I do. That always made things lopsided.”

“Lopsided?”

“There are so many things that I have done, that Dean and I have been through, but you and I haven’t. Things I know about both of us that you don’t yet.”

“You told Past-Cas about it though,” said Young Dean. “So he knows more than me too.”

“It’s not the same as living it,” said Cas. “Life changes us. Sometimes it takes years of unconscious development. Expanding in inches so that we don’t notice how different we’ve become. Sometimes it happens all at once. I suspect that’s rarer.”

Young Dean suspected the same, but he’d been given that rare opportunity in coming to the future the first time. He turned the handgun over in his hands carefully, then tucked it away. “What do you think I would be like if I didn’t have to forget?” he asked. “How do you think life would be different for me?”

“Shouldn’t you be asking Dean this?”

“No, I want to ask you,” said Young Dean. “I think you know me. Better than I know me and almost as well as Sam. And I think you would see a better fate for me than I would for myself, and that’s the version I want to hear about right now.”

Cas looked down at the ground, mouth giving that considering tilt of an almost-smile. “Well, this is one thing. Asking for that which won’t hurt you instead of seeking what will.”

Young Dean groaned, dragged a hand over his eyes. “I’m such a messed-up son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Cas, I’m sorry for putting this on you.”

“I’m not exactly the picture of composure myself,” said Castiel.

“Sure you are, you’re all stoic and zen and not scared of anything.”

“I’m very old and harder to kill,” said Cas. “But the choices I’ve made? I justify them as rational at the time, but they often arise out of panic or desperation or misguided judgment. All that to say we’re evenly matched in terms of recklessness.”

“No,” said Young Dean. “You deserve so much better than me.”

“Dean,” said Cas. He looked again at the graffitied entranceway. “Dean,” he said again, like he could speak to the man inside the compound. He sighed and looked at Young Dean once more. “I think if you remembered the future, you could become a very different man. I see the changes. I see the potential for openness and self-honesty that could alter you and everyone around you. But I also see obsession. Perhaps if you returned to your time and remembered all this, you would become like your father: single-mindedly pursuing a goal at the expense of every other relationship and opportunity. When you called us from your own time, I saw it then. I should have known you would do anything to get here.”

“But if I could have you, then, too,” said Young Dean. “That would solve all my problems. You’d save me.”

Cas shook his head, looking down, smiling sadly. “Dean, I love you. I love you like it was the thing I was created to do. I’ve loved you for years, and so deeply it echoes back through the ages; such that it seems I was made for this love even before you existed. I want to be the thing that saves you. I want to be what protects you from every sorrow. But I can’t promise you that there won’t be hardship and disagreement and loss and mistakes and all the _mess_ that comes with living in the world. I have to accept that love does not solve every problem. Love won’t save us from grief or failure. Only, it will be there through it.”

Young Dean took a moment to hear it all. Then he slid down the side of the Impala to reach the ground, resting his elbows on his knees and combing his hands through his hair. After a moment he tipped his head back against the car and looked up at Castiel. “Cas, you know, you’re amazing? I think I kind of adore you.”

“Only kind of?” said Cas, lifting one brow a shade.

“I can’t make big speeches like you,” said Young Dean. He put a hand over his chest. “It’s like my heart has a boner.”

Cas laughed. Actually laughed. Young Dean did too, passing a hand over his face. “Sorry, Cas. From what I can tell, that’s about as romantic as I’ll ever get.”

“I’m well aware,” said Cas. “I’ve never expected different.”

“You’re questioning your taste right now, aren’t you?” said Young Dean.

“No. You’re the one thing I’m certain of.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Cas, how do I get _anywhere_ with you? And how does it take me so fucking long to get it through my head that I want you?” He hauled himself up to stand again, feeling slightly steadier. Cas studied him with fond amusement, and Young Dean wasn’t sure whether Cas liked him for himself or for what he saw of the future Dean in him. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps it didn’t matter much to Cas.

“It was the kind of change that happens all at once,” said Cas.

“You aren’t mad I didn’t figure it out earlier?”

“I’m too satisfied that it’s come to be at all. I wouldn’t dare to ask for it any other way.”

“It sounds like you’ve known so much longer than he has, what you felt,” said Young Dean.

“I imagine I have,” said Cas.

“You know he just wouldn’t let himself,” said Young Dean. “He wouldn’t put a name to it.”

“I wondered, sometimes.”

“It’s not that he didn’t feel the same. He’s just… He’s… You know.”

“He’s Dean.”

“Yeah. That,” said Young Dean. “Cas, he thought you couldn’t. He thought you _couldn’t_. And not just because you’re an angel. That was part of it, sure. That’s what he’d be willing to tell you. But I know it was more than that. He didn’t think anyone _could_.”

“Dean…” A sudden displacement, the sound of flapping wings cutting through and intended words, and Dean stood with Past-Cas before them.

“We should go,” said Dean. “They’re gonna go off soon—”

“I wanted to see,” said Young Dean.

“You’ve been up close with one avalanche already,” said Dean. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Dean got behind the wheel without further preamble, the others quickly slotting into the car and slamming doors after themselves. Dean reversed rapidly down the road as the boom of bombs and collapsing rock began to shake the mountain. Above the compound, a few trees pulled their roots from the earth and fell with thunderous groans.

“Sam?” Young Dean asked, voice raised over the tumult.

“Last they heard? Alive. Uncooperative. Lippy.”

“So, same as usual?” said Young Dean.

“Same as usual,” Dean said. He got the car into a space he could back up, then straightened out to drive forward, the palm of his hand sliding against the wheel through these rotations. “He wasn’t ever here, from the sounds of it. There were about a dozen in the compound, looked like they’d come out the wrong side of a war. We might find a lead in the Sierra Nevada? Another compound like this one. Hell if I know. Had enough of these fucking mountain people, I tell you. Hard to say if their intel’s worth anything. They were some low-level Arimaspians, am I right, Past-Cas?”

Behind Dean, Past-Cas sat back heavily in the seat, not speaking, moving very little. He clasped and unclasped one hand spasmodically. He gave a hum in response. “Dean,” he said. “You remember when they uttered that curse? I think I’m beginning to feel it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » I got to introduce one of my favourite American cryptids, the Dark Watchers. these would have been great monsters to see on spn, very cool aesthetically and way easier for practical effects than dragons. why was I never hired to write for this show  
> » I won't go a week sans update again, I promise, I just wanted this to be good as I could make it  
> » ch. 5 title reference: not Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (although a little), but Joan Didion’s _Slouching Towards Bethlehem_ , specifically the (very short, easily recommended) essay “[Los Angeles Notebook](https://zscalarts.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/los-angeles-notebook-joan-didion-pp-162-jpg.pdf).”


	6. this be the verse you grave for me

The spell started in his fingertips, but Past-Cas had given over to full-body shudders by the time they reached Essie’s. Dean and Cas had to carry him inside, laying him out on the daybed. He looked pale and pained, shoulders bowed forward as his body tried to curl in on itself. He didn’t utter a sound, but the panic showing in his wide eyes and the fact he couldn’t talk himself through this said enough. 

“Can’t you do something for him, Cas?” Young Dean asked.

“I don’t know what the spell was,” said Castiel. “The best I can do is put him under until we figure out the counter-curse.”

“Then do that,” said Young Dean.

Castiel put a hand to Past-Cas’ forehead, palm glowing at the contact. Past-Cas slowly stopped quivering, giving one long exhale as he finally calmed.

“What’s going to happen to him?” said Young Dean.

“We need to know what the spell was,” said Cas. “Dean, any idea?”

“Sounded like mumbo-jumbo to me,” said Dean, staring down at Past-Cas. Young Dean knew that expression. Concern and confusion but, more than anything, guilt. He should have stepped in the way of the spell. He should have been the one to take the brunt of any pain. Even if what would only disable an angel would kill a human, it still should have been Dean. He was the grunt. He was expendable.

It was fucked up, thought Young Dean. Fucked up for anyone to think that way. But Young Dean looked down at Past-Cas and wished he had been present in the compound. Maybe it would have hit him instead. He wasn’t needed to save the day this time around: he’d proven that recently in spades. They’d be able to move on without him in a way they couldn’t if it were anyone else.

“What does he need?” Jody asked, stepping forward from the doorway, passing Essie who looked on with a furrowed brow. “Time to heal? A counter-spell?”

“I don’t think this will go away of its own accord,” said Castiel. “I’ve been hit with a bad spell before myself.”

“Our go-to witch is now Queen of Hell,” said Dean. “And without our stuff from the bunker, we have no way of getting there. The one guy who could get us the ingredients is the one we need to save.”

“What a shame,” said Essie, “that there are no hunters nearby who specialize in witches.” She moved between them all, eyes flicking over Past-Cas. “We don’t know what the spell is, but it’s probably Greek. Curses are specific, but in my experience, cures can be more general.”

“You know a cure?”

“I know where we can look for one,” she said. “I may… I may on occasion keep the books I recover from witches. That is to say, I may keep all of them. It’s the librarian in me.”

“Where do we start?” asked Dean.

“The obvious place is the Papyri Graecae Magicae,” said Essie.

“Yes. Obvious,” said Dean.

“It’s the most comprehensive,” Essie continued, ignoring Dean. “And the Ephesia Grammata is worth trying.”

“And you have those? What are we waiting for?”

“I have them,” said Essie, “but I don’t know that it’s a group project. I’ve never had the time to do a translation. I’m not sure how many of you are up on your Old Coptic and Ancient Greek.”

Castiel raised a hand. “Just me and you, then, Essie.”

“Well,” she said. “No time to waste.”

There wasn’t much for the rest of them to do. Past-Cas seemed to be stable, despite the small and occasional contractions of his features. Dean and Jody stepped outside to talk over a beer, but Young Dean remained inside, keeping vigil beside Past-Cas.

He didn’t know how long he just sat by him, watching. Dean eventually came back in, two fresh beers in hand. He offered one to Young Dean.

“Think they’ll find a cure soon?” Young Dean asked. “Think they’ll find anything at all?”

Dean’s mouth twisted as he settled into a chair, legs extending out to a footrest. His eyes also trailed over Past-Cas’ pale face. “Gotta hope so,” he said. “This Essie, she’s one smart cookie. I think she has the right idea.”

“Librarians, man,” said Young Dean. “Who knew? Her memory’s like an encyclopedia.”

“Yeah,” said Dean. “She even remembered us.”

“Did she? I must’ve missed that.”

“Seeing me on the Most Wanted list cemented things, from the sounds of it,” said Dean. “But she remembered about the book and everything.”

“What book?” Young Dean asked, taking a swig from his beer.

“You know what book,” said Dean.

Young Dean turned his head and chewed his lip, thinking back. “The griffin one?” She’d helped him find the title in the card catalogue. Was he the one who got her onto hunting?

“The what? No, not a griffin one. The—” Dean paused, turning a shade paler. “It hasn’t happened to you yet. You’d remember.”

“Did I mess up the timeline?” Young Dean asked.

“No.” Dean wet his lips. “I mean. I don’t think so. You just aren’t there yet. You took out the ‘Brokeback Mountain’ book.”

“No,” said Young Dean. “I took out this _Wyoming Stories_ book. Because I was remembering stuff about Wyoming.”

Dean dragged a hand over his mouth, shaking his head. “This is so fucked up,” he said. “You’re telling me we only took out that book because we were remembering Wyoming happening.”

“And it had a horse on the cover,” said Young Dean.

“Right, but… That means this was all supposed to happen. This all already happened. Because you checked out that book.”

“I told you, it wasn’t called whatever you said.”

“It’s one of the stories inside,” said Dean. He spoke thickly. “The gay cowboy story.”

“The what?” Young Dean’s heart did something funny at the mere _concept_.

“Everybody’s heard of it now, but back then I had no idea,” said Dean. He rubbed his thumb against the beer label, the soggy paper beading before crumbling away. “Christ, buddy, file this under things I really shouldn’t tell you but am gonna anyway.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Young Dean.

“Here’s the thing,” said Dean. The corners of his mouth were tight. “When this is all wrapped up, you’re gonna go back to your own time. Back to Bobby’s. You’ll close the case on that hunt he called you in for that ended up being nothing. And you’ll go back to the motel where Sam and Dad are, in the town where Essie’s a librarian. Only…” His thumbnail scraped at the cold glue-marks left underneath the beer label. “Only you forgot something there. That library book.”

“I didn’t have anything to read on the bus,” Young Dean said. He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, but he was listening carefully. He knew Dean wasn’t telling this story for nothing.

“You never got to reading that last story,” said Dean. “The gay cowboy one. Didn’t even know it was there. But Dad. Oh man. Dad found it.”

Young Dean’s face became slack and serious. “No,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Dean. He tipped his head back against the chair, looking at the ceiling without seeing anything. A humourless smile touched his mouth. “Oh yeah. It was bad.” He dragged his tongue along his bottom teeth. Memories seen and heard all over again.

“Didn’t ask for an explanation. Didn’t give me the chance to say I hadn’t known. Not that he’d have believed me. And there I was— I didn’t even understand what he was so mad about, at first. He laid into me like— Not before or since did I ever see him as mad as that.”

Dean swallowed and continued on. “And where Essie comes in is Dad tore out the pages, see. Of the library book. And I don’t know what was going through my head. I shoulda just chucked it in the garbage and never gone back. I could’ve left it in the damn book drop. But I went in there, and I tried to say I didn’t know what happened to it, that it was an accident, that I’d pay for it, that if they wanted me to work off the price of the book, I’d do that. It was stupid as shit. But Essie, she just looked at me and said—and we both knew she was lying—she said it sounded like the book was damaged before I got it, and I shouldn’t have to pay for that. I damn near broke down then and there.”

Young Dean had slumped forward, listening to it all, picturing it all. Picturing what happened in between, in the parts that Dean left out. They had a shorthand with each other. There were things that didn’t need to be said.

“Dad sent me away again for a bit after that,” said Dean. “Sam never knew about it. And the worst part is, I’m pissed about it now, telling you, but back then? I told myself Dad was just doing what he needed to. Did it to look after me, to set me right. He said things… He said things that still echo through my head, that I still hear in his voice if I even think about…” Dean shook his head, took a deep drink from his beer.

“Can’t believe it,” said Dean. “Can’t believe that’s the very next thing I have to send you back to.” His eyes focused on Young Dean again at last, really looking at him. “I don’t… I don’t actually want to. You don’t deserve it. If you never heard the things he has to say, you’d be better for it.”

“But the… the ‘calibration’ of the universe,” said Young Dean, voice low and quiet. “Everything that happened to you, to us, it’s all part of the timeline. Even the terrible parts.” He didn’t sound much like he believed himself.

“Yeah, but just look at you,” said Dean, gesturing with a hand. “Look at how good you are. I mean it, you’re good and you’re hopeful and if we could keep you here you’d be looked after. And that’s not something you ever got. Not once.”

“It’s pointless to talk about,” said Young Dean. “I can’t believe we swapped places on this. But look, I know I’m not needed here. I don’t serve anyone any purpose.”

“Well fuck that,” said Dean. “Maybe you don’t have to have one. Maybe you could enjoy being some dumb teenager with no responsibilities for a change.”

“No,” said Young Dean. “I’m barely a teenager anymore. It’s too late, it’s always been too late. I know I have to go back. I’m not going to ruin lives by obsessing over something I never should’ve had.”

Dean shook his head, looking away, but he didn’t have any quick counter-arguments.

“You know I’m right,” said Young Dean. “It’s what you said from the start. If I kill the world because I overstay my welcome in the future, well, that would cut the party short anyways.”

“It sucks, man,” said Dean. “It sucks to think we could’ve had it another way.”

They fell into a mutual silence, lingering in it even when their beers were long empty, neither making a move to get up. Neither of the Deans turned their heads from Past-Cas until Essie and Cas reappeared in the doorway at last. Essie had a fresh notecard with neat writing in her hand, lifting it in triumph. Trust Essie to make something two and a half thousand years old look like a tidy grandmother’s recipe card.

“We think we found something,” said Essie. “It took a lot of digging, I must say.”

“There were so many spells against scorpions,” said Cas. “So many.”

“Dishonest shopkeepers were also a serious concern,” Essie said, “but that’s beside the point. This one is to counteract ‘bad magic.’ Most of the ingredients are simple: olive oil, a strip of linen, some ‘brightness of the mountain’ – but that’s just oregano. It needs snake-fang and a bronze cup, which wouldn’t be hard to find. The only thing I _truly_ don’t have is…” Essie grimaced. “The lion semen.”

“The… The lion semen,” Dean repeated.

“The lion semen,” confirmed Cas.

“Can we stop saying that?” said Young Dean. “I think we all got it.”

Jody entered the room then, looking down at her phone as she hung up a call. “Hey, what’d I miss?” she said.

“Mm-mm,” said Young Dean with a shake of his head.

“I think I may know where to get it,” said Essie.

“Please don’t say, ‘the zoo,’” said Dean. “I’m begging you.”

“What’d I miss?” Jody asked again. “I really think I missed something.”

“There’s a witch I know,” said Essie. “He might help us.”

“But you hunt witches,” said Dean. “I don’t imagine they’d be too keen to help you.”

“Oh honey,” said Essie. “Not all hunting has to be hard. Most witches are just girls—often girls—with no power and no means who get pulled in. First, it’s just a spell to make rent or to get their baby over that terrible cough. They don’t go in to hurt anyone. Then the power gets addictive, the spells get bigger, the threefold consequences to others are just collateral. I try to get them out before they get too deep, before it becomes a fight. They’re just people, you know. Just humans.”

“But this guy you know obviously practices,” said Dean.

“Don’t think I didn’t clock you on that go-to witch who’s Queen of Hell,” said Essie. “Don’t ask me about Reid Jenkins and I won’t call you a hypocrite.”

“Fair,” said Dean. “Alright, call up this friend of yours.”

“‘Friend’ is a _strong_ word,” said Essie. “But I believe he’ll help us.”

“What do we need this Reid Jenkins for?” Jody asked.

“His lion semen,” said Cas.

“His…” Jody didn’t finish that sentence.

“Goddam witches and their bodily fluids,” said Young Dean.

“Witches are the worst,” said Dean.  


* * *

  
Reid Jenkins had a couple hours’ drive before he made it there, and Young Dean couldn’t be convinced to leave Past-Cas’ side, even if he ought to get some shut-eye while he had the chance. Jody and Essie, with enough years of hunting and parenting between them, knew to catch rest where they could get it.

Dean drifted to the kitchen, vaguely hungry, ready for another beer after that intense conversation with Young Dean. It was different, to see him just on the other side of something that Dean didn’t typically think about as affecting him. There were the big-ticket items—Hell and apocalypses and dying multiple times. And then there were these more insidious moments, ones he thought he didn’t remember, but in truth had never really escaped.

He took another beer from the fridge, the door swinging closed again as Cas came in.

Dean’s eyes flicked over Cas. Every time he looked at him it was like he remembered all over that things were different between them now. Better, unquestionably better, but Dean still wasn’t quite used to it. In some ways very little had changed: they were still working on a case, still focused primarily on averting disaster, but there was another layer of understanding and possibility between them now.

“How you holding up, Cas?” Dean asked. “I mean, that’s you in there.” He nodded his head back towards the living room where Past-Cas lay uneasily unconscious on the daybed.

“I’m not worried yet,” said Castiel. “He’s strong. As long as this spell works, he’ll be better by morning.”

“Teen-Dean could do with some of that cool,” said Dean.

“It’s sweet that he’s concerned.”

“He’s all mixed up with feelings. I don’t think he knows what’s what anymore. Hell, maybe I don’t even know.”

Cas sat at the kitchen island, and Dean sat kitty-corner to him. Their knees brushed by accident and Dean pulled back out of habit. Then, purposefully, let it happen again.

“You’re more worried about Sam,” said Cas.

Dean kept a straight face, but offered the barest nod of concession. He looked over his shoulder, eyes flicking to the kitchen doorways to make sure no one was coming up on them. “I’ve told Teen-Dean not to worry,” he said. “Sam’s tougher than he looks and knows how to handle himself. But I still don’t like it, man.”

“You don’t think we’re any closer to finding him?”

“What did we get out of today? Another dead end. Sure, they knew a little. Knew Sam was alive and kicking as of yesterday. But that just ain’t enough for me. I want him back.”

“We will find him, Dean.”

Dean gave another faint nod, then took a drink from his beer. They always succeeded, and the Arimaspians weren’t much compared to what they’d faced off against in the past, but the prolonged uncertainty left him antsy.

He looked back at Cas, whose eyes hadn’t left him. Cas. _His_ Cas. It hit him all over again, just like it had not five minutes before. He didn’t have to keep things bottled up. He didn’t have to hide things anymore. It was a habit he’d kept for so long he didn’t know how to break it.

He wanted to talk but he didn’t know how. Teen-Dean would know. Lately, it seemed hard to make the kid shut up. He hadn’t been like that so much in the past, Dean knew that perfectly well, but since coming to the future he’d apparently decided every feeling and every thought was up for discussion. In some ways, it wasn’t a bad way to live. He didn’t get stuck guessing. Didn’t get stuck doubting.

Dean could barely speak without forcing his words. Looking at his beer bottle, thumb pressing slowly along the seam of the glass. Spoke tersely in the direction of the bottle like it had offended him in some way as he said, “I was talking with the kid. It came up that he’s just shy of this bad time with Dad. I’d call it a fight, but a fight takes two people.”

“What was it about?” Cas asked.

“A library book,” said Dean. “Look, it’s not important. Or, it is. It wasn’t really about a book. But the point is, I don’t want to send him back there. If we could send him to just after it happens so he doesn’t know, or if we could intervene so that Dad never finds that book and never explodes, you know, I’d give anything to do that.”

“If it was that important to you, if it shaped you, unfortunately that likely makes it more critical,” said Cas, slowly, mentally unspooling the line of fate as he spoke.

“I didn’t think it shaped me,” said Dean. “Till now.” Dean’s fingers drummed against the counter-top, and he finally raised his eyes to meet Cas’. “John Winchester’s voice runs through my head a lot, even now, but he’s got more to say on some topics than on others.”

Cas kept his gaze steady, even as he faintly tipped his head. “I think I can guess,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Dean, nose wrinkling and mouth twisting in a moue of displeasure. “Yeah, you can likely guess.”

Cas just studied him, like he could see all the seams where Dean had broken. Dean thought he’d sealed them up tight enough that nobody noticed, but, as with most things, Cas was an exception.

“Worst part is, I didn’t love Dad any less after it happened,” said Dean. “Some messed up part of me respected him more, if anything. I wanted to prove myself to him. It was all a misunderstanding. I wouldn’t give him any reason to doubt from now on. I was a good son, and I’d show him that. At least, when he could stand to look at me again. Even when he was wrong about something, he was right. He was right about everything and his word was gospel. Well. You know how that is.”

“A little,” said Cas.

“But if Teen-Dean never had to hear it, it would be better for him. Sometimes… Sometimes I can’t help thinking, what if he just stayed here? It’s not vanity or nothing—”

“I know it’s not vanity,” said Cas.

“I just think about what he’d be like growing up with the, whatever-they-are, zillennials that they got now. Kids like Claire and Jack and Jody’s girls. And just, you know, staying with us. It could be good for him. Healthy.” He took a drink from his beer. “Or as healthy as living with your hugely messed-up grown-up self gets.”

“While we’re talking in theoreticals,” said Cas, eyes drifting up to look at the ceiling. “If I were to time travel again, I’d count a visit to John Winchester as long overdue.”

“Don’t,” Dean said quietly. “He wasn’t perfect, but—”

“That’s too generous.”

“No, listen. I know it is. I mean, I know what he was.”

“Do you?”

“Sure I do. Yeah. I know.”

“You just won’t say it,” said Castiel. “You’ll talk around it and make excuses as if… as if to admit it affected you would mean you just weren’t strong enough to bear it.”

Dean looked pointedly away, chin up, swaying back in his seat to straighten his shoulders. He shook his head not because Cas was wrong, but because he didn’t want to hear it. “I shouldn’t’ve brought it up,” he said. Voice clipped, closing the book.

Cas narrowed his eyes curiously. “But you did bring it up,” said Cas. “On purpose.”

Dean’s gaze only drifted further, looking out the window above the sink, as if the reflected image of the kitchen in the black windowpane was now very interesting to him.

“I won’t make you talk about it,” said Castiel. “Of course, I don’t think I could make you do anything.”

Dean gave a rasp of a laugh, looking back down at his beer. “That is… That is not true. Angel, you got no idea what I’d do for you.”

Cas tipped his head again, almost daring to smile. Not much surprised him, but this nearly did. “Really?”

“I’m going to regret owning to that so early in the game,” said Dean, smiling a little more in return. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes just began to show. “I’m showing my whole damn hand.”

“I dispute that,” Castiel said. “All I know is that I’m playing cards with Dean Winchester and no one will tell me the name, the rules, or the purpose of the game. I know there are cards, but not what any of them mean. Is anyone winning? I’m making it up as I go along.”

Dean laughed, which Cas reacted to with a cautious smile as if he were gauging whether he’d been given a reward. “Well I’m not playing against you, Cas,” said Dean. “We’re partners. Like in Euchre.”

“I don’t know what Euchre is.”

“We’ll save it for our golden years,” said Dean, leaning back a little and taking a relaxed swig of his beer. “Down in the community hall, drinking terrible coffee, triple-checking the numbers on our raffle tickets when they do the draw.”

“This is our future?” said Cas.

“We’re gonna have enemies,” said Dean. He squinted as he planned it all out. “Named, like, Dave and Sharon. The Biermans. Ooh, we hate those Biermans. And we’re always trying to get our names on the tournament plaque instead. And we’ll miss the times when the only monsters we had to face had fangs and claws instead of coral lipstick and condescending lawn advice.”

“This would make you happy?” Cas asked.

Dean lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I dunno. I admit it sounds kind of terrible. But don’t we deserve the chance to try it?”

“It sounds more bearable than many other things that have happened to us. More survivable, at the very least.”

“Yeah, and that’s another thing. No more dying,” said Dean, like it could be issued as a basic order. “I’ve about had it with all these deaths. The coming back’s worked so far, but I don’t trust it in the long run and I hate the in-between.”

“If it’s something we have any power over,” said Cas. “I’d like the same.” He tipped his head faintly and said, without the tone of a question: “This isn’t what normal people talk about, is it?”

“I don’t know what normal people say to each other,” said Dean, taking another drink from his beer.

“We could try,” said Cas. His eyes squinched in the corners. “I could say, for instance: I like what the sun does.” His head tilted again. “Your freckles are back.”

Dean chuckled. “Makes me look like a damn kid,” he said. His thumb and forefinger spread across his nose, across the ridges of his cheeks now peppered with the offending speckles.

“I don’t think you need to worry about that, with Teen-Dean around.” Cas looked at ease, content with this soft back-and-forth. “I like your freckles. You’re handsome. I think I’m allowed to say that now.”

“Careful, Cas,” said Dean. He leaned in a shade, head dipping. “You keep at this, I might start thinking you have a crush on me.”

Cas beamed brighter than expected at that, giving one soft, startled laugh. In some ways, this conversation was just like any of their usual banter; it followed the same rhythm and melody, just transposed to a different key. And even Dean, a master of repression, couldn’t deny the warmth that bloomed in his chest at delighting Castiel in such a simple way. The feeling started at his heart and ended up in his smile, in his eyes, affection spilling over the hitherto impervious breakwall.

He bowed his head, smiling, thinking in this moment, yeah, he could stand for some time alone with Cas.

Tonight wouldn’t give them that, though. Tonight Past-Cas was unconscious and under a dangerous spell, a witch with a questionable storeroom was driving his way up the coast, and Sam was still missing. Still, it didn’t stop Dean from catching Cas when they stood, closing him in against the island, and necking like teenagers.  


* * *

  
It was two in the morning when Reid Jenkins knocked on the door. Essie was up again, wearing comfy clothes under a patterned robe and a pair of glasses they hadn’t seen her in before. She opened the door to another blast of warm wind and a man in his thirties who smelled more strongly of weed than someone who had recently been driving probably should’ve.

Reid had Mick Jagger’s looks, which wasn’t a compliment, with shaggy dark hair and features that looked too big for his face. He wore a studded leather jacket and plenty of jewellery over a muscle tank with a truly terrible sunset gradient and the silhouette of palm trees. In all, he looked exactly like someone who might have lion semen on hand.

“Essie,” he greeted with a too-wide, yet completely genuine smile. His lanky arms draped around her in a familiar hug. For her part, Essie widened her eyes expressively at Dean and Cas and gave Reid a few ginger pats on the back.

“Thanks for coming here, Reid,” said Essie.

“Anything for you,” said Reid, stepping back. He still had the hazy, squinted look of someone quite stoned. “How’re Simon and Lanie?”

“The kids are good,” said Essie. “I can tell them you say hello.”

“Yeah. Yeah, ‘hello,’ that’s what I’d say,” said Reid with a nod. He looked away from Essie to the rest of the room, doing a double-take and taking a step back when his eyes landed on Cas. “Whoa. Your _aura_ , man.” He started to walk in a wide circle around Cas. “It’s, like, 4D.” His eyes panned up and down Castiel openly.

“Watch it, man,” said Dean, eyes sharply following Reid.

Reid held up his hands. “Touchy touchy,” he said.

“Can we just get to this?” Dean asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Reid, who seemed essentially non-aggressive, one to please and pacify. “We’ll get right to it. Only I just… I just need a sandwich.” He looked at Essie. “Can I have a sandwich before we start? I got the tummy rumbles.”

“He’s got the damn munchies,” Dean muttered to Cas.

And yet, with all his passive command, Reid got his way. He threw together a decent sandwich from the things in Essie’s fridge, working with an odd mix of haphazard motion and single-minded focus. Essie, Dean, and Cas simply trailed him, helpless against the inebriated tunnel-vision of their would-be saviour. They corralled him to the living room at last. He carried a plate in one hand, held under his food as he took a generous mouthful of the sandwich. Past-Cas looked neither better nor worse, stretched out unconscious on the daybed.

Following a step behind Reid, Dean raised his eyebrow at Young Dean. Specifically, at Young Dean’s hand caught up in Past-Cas’. Young Dean looked back with defiance and didn’t let go.

Reid paused mid-chew, tried to say something too muffled to understand, then chewed again and swallowed. “Twinsies,” he said. He looked from Young Dean to the older Dean and narrowed his eyes. “You’ve been playing in the time stream, compadre. Better hope you don’t get swept away.”

He took another bite of his sandwich and went to the table where Essie’s neatly scripted spell lay. He left a smear of mustard on the notecard. “I knew a man who flirted with time in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He made it back, but not the same. He didn’t like who he met and begged me to either fix it or end things early.” Reid sighed through one more bite of his sandwich without disclosing how it ended. He set the food on his plate again and pushed it aside, leaning over the spell.

“Simple enough,” he decided at the end of it. “As long as you don’t fuck up the pronunciation.”

“He’s gonna fuck up the pronunciation,” Dean muttered, elbow nudging Cas. “Look at this guy.”

“Actually,” said Reid. He looked at Dean with a more direct focus than he’d hitherto been capable of. “My Greek is great and my spellwork is better.” He strutted forward. Dean could smell the pot and patchouli coming off him. Reid was a few inches shorter but didn’t seem to know it. His eyes flicked over Dean. “You think you’re the only one who thinks it’s on him to save the world?”

“I’m not saying nothing,” said Dean, raising his hands. “Long as you can help our friend there.”

“Oh yeah. I can help him,” said Reid. He turned his head over his shoulder to scan over Past-Cas. “What _is_ he? The same as you,” he said, looking at Cas. “Matchy-matchy with the whole ethereal energy this one doesn’t want me to look at.” He gestured with a thumb at Dean. “Or was that just about the tight bod? Anyway. Not human, not demon, not Grand Coven Priestess.” He widened his eyes a little at the thought that crossed his mind. “Aliens?”

“How about you don’t worry about it?” said Dean. “You stalling?”

“Not stalling,” said Reid, turning slowly on his heel to look at Dean again. “Savouring. You should give it a try sometime.”

“Hey, Reefer Madness. You know what he’s not savouring?” This was Young Dean, speaking up from his place at Past-Cas’ side. “Past-Cas was in pain before we knocked him out and he might still be feeling it. So if we could save stoner philosophy for later, I think we’d all appreciate it.”

“Touchy touchy,” Reid murmured again. He sighed and moved to take off the knit satchel he wore across his body. He pulled out a bronze bowl as well as a few additional jars and sachets. He took out a black candle engraved with sigils as well and set it in the middle of the table, giving his cheap gas-station lighter a few flicks to fire up.

“What’s that for?” Dean asked. He didn’t remember a candle in the spell, and he didn’t trust the look of it.

“Ambience,” Reid drawled. The wick caught and burned a perfectly normal yellow. Not spooky blue or black. The witch was really just a stickler for atmosphere. They should likely be glad he didn’t insist on lighting incense.

Essie stepped over to Dean’s side as Reid started to mix together the items for the spell. He brought his own snake-fang, it seemed, alongside the jar of… Dean looked deliberately towards Essie.

“He’s a little eccentric,” Essie said, her tone quieter and carrying less than Dean’s had. “But he means well.”

“He’s not even the weirdest guy we’ve met,” said Dean. “Which, now that I say it, is making me question a lot of things about my life.”

“I do a lot of that as well,” Essie said, wincing as Reid carelessly wiped his hand off on his shirt.

“I don’t want to look?” Dean asked, head still turned pointedly towards Essie.

“I think it’s alright now—oh, no, never mind. Don’t look.”

Dean gave a nod.

“Thanks for helping us, Essie,” he said. “You’ve been more than generous. You saved Jody’s skin, finding her when you did. Then getting all of us on track in our hunt with your research and contacts. Now this? We owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” said Essie. “You’ve been enlightening and, dare I say, even good company. I like your Castiel.” She said it with genuine warmth.

Dean didn’t want to admit how much he liked hearing her say it. He struggled not to be too earnest, not to come off as too partial, despite the fact he half-wanted to gush. “Well. What’s not to like?” he said.

“It must be something,” she said, eyes drifting over Young Dean now. Holding Past-Cas’ hand, wearing that soulfully troubled look. “Watching the two of them. How lucky to fall in love with someone twice over.”

Dean hadn’t realised till she said it. This had happened. He’d been that teenager, he _was_ Young Dean, and he had held Cas’ hand and felt intense and passionate and stupid over him. Dean had, in his past, visited the future and met Cas twice over.

It was a bit of a mindfuck.

“Yeah,” he said, voice croaky. “Lucky.” He cleared his throat. “Still,” he said. Navigating back to topics where he didn’t feel perilously close to losing control. “We didn’t mean to bring you all this trouble. Don’t know how we’d have gotten this far without you.”

“Nonsense. If even half the rumours I’ve heard about the Winchester boys are true, you’ve done your share of saving. But you know, you don’t have to go it alone. I’m not the only one who would lend a hand if the call came.”

Dean gave a half-hearted shrug, feeling that offer as a strain, as he always did. “Most of the time, we want to keep people out of our messes,” said Dean. “We’ve seen too many friends get hurt.”

“You sound just like my Lanie,” said Essie. “She hunts too. Has a martyr complex like anything you’ve seen. It worries me, and you worry me just the same, talking like that.”

“I’m not alone,” said Dean. “I’ve got Sam. I’ve got Cas.” He looked to Young Dean, whose focus was now on Reid despite the lingering expression of distaste on his face. “He’s got my dad, despite everything.” It was the one thing that could be said for John Winchester. He would fight to the finish against the supernatural for his sons. It was part of why Dean had been so faithful to him. That he was responsible for getting them so much in the way of the supernatural was beside the point.

“Just say you’ll give me a call one day when you need the help,” said Essie. “That’s all I’m asking.”

Reid finished with combining the ingredients and began to intone the spell in a rhythmic chant, holding a hand over the bronze bowl. The pressure in the room changed, deepening, then easing. Dean never quite got used to the strange tension that followed magic being performed. It set his teeth on edge.

He took a steadying breath. He looked once more at Essie and gave a nod. “We’ll call,” he promised.

Reid’s voice took on the tone of a hymn, repeating the words a second time in an iambic rhythm. A third and final time, faster, a dry mist rising from the bronze bowl as he chanted. The final word left silence in its wake.

Past-Cas gasped in a breath, eyes shooting open, body seeking to rise. He looked around himself rapidly, eyes narrowing as he took in Reid, the others standing nearby, and last of all Young Dean who held his hand.

Young Dean he seemed to trust more than anyone, relaxing a shade. His fingers squeezed once against Young Dean’s hand, but didn’t let go.

“You’re back,” said Young Dean, a cautious smile hitching at his mouth. “How you feeling?”

“Better,” said Cas, the bass in his voice a touch deeper. He pushed himself to sit up carefully. “I see we work with witches now.”

“When there’s nothing else for it,” said Dean.

“A thank you would be appreciated,” said Reid. “That wasn’t novice-level magic.”

“We appreciate it. We do,” said Dean.

“Thank you,” said Past-Cas, quite charitably. “You are obviously not the questionably-competent ragamuffin you first appear to be.”

Dean broke the subsequent silence. “That’s, uh. That’s a compliment where he’s from.”  


* * *

  
Young Dean was exhausted by the time all was said and done. They’d all stayed up another hour, rehashing the events of the evening, exchanging theories, coming up with tracks to follow tomorrow. While the rest of them seemed to enjoy this second wind, Young Dean was left out of it for the most part. His brain was too tired to contribute much. Even though he didn’t have the experience the rest of them did, he usually wasn’t bad for spit-balling or seeing another way out of things. If they’d had this conversation in the morning, he might’ve said a little more instead of just sagging lower in his seat with the passage of the minute-hand on the clock.

They broke it up close to half-past three. Reid had been given a couch to sleep on despite Essie’s valiant attempts to send him to a hostel instead. Young Dean made his tired climb to the attic.

At the top of the stairs, just outside the doorway, stood Past-Cas. He’d been in the living room a minute ago, but of course, he could beat Young Dean here.

Dean’s words from earlier in the day rang through Young Dean’s head again. Nothing could happen between them. That body belonged to someone. There were limits to what Young Dean could ask for. Holding his hand? Surely that small comfort wouldn’t offend. Kissing Past-Cas like he wanted? Out of the question.

“Dean,” said Past-Cas. Young Dean walked by him into the small room. Past-Cas followed, oblivious to common social barriers. Young Dean carelessly stripped out his shirt, swapping it for something with longer sleeves to sleep in.

“I remember you staying with me,” said Past-Cas. He did not look away or blush while Young Dean took off his jeans. If Young Dean thought about it too long, he might have smiled at the prelapsarian character of it.

“You did not need to,” Past-Cas continued. “As it served no direct purpose. But I understand it is something that is offered as a comfort.”

“It’s something people do, Cas,” said Young Dean. “When they can’t do anything else.”

“I wanted to say thank you,” said Past-Cas.

“Did you like it?” Young Dean asked. He paced to a stop in front of the window, moonlight silvering his features. He looked over his shoulder. “Is that something you like, me being close to you?”

Past-Cas turned his head away, and there was that old fluster. “I… I do,” he said. “It is not… It is not consistent with the way I think of other humans. I like them, generally. But differently.”

Young Dean nodded. He turned his glance down to the garden below the window, where he’d looked at the stars with Past-Cas just the night before. “Good to know,” he said. “I really did corrupt the angel.”

“Dean,” said Past-Cas. Young Dean wouldn’t pretend it did nothing to him to hear his name said in that voice. He drew in his lower lip, running his tongue along it, more determined than ever not to look away from the window. “There is nothing dishonest or impure about you.”

Young Dean laughed, folding his arms over his middle. “Shows what you know,” he said.

Past-Cas came closer, a furrow in his brow, his eyes never leaving Young Dean. “Have I done something to offend you?” he asked.

Young Dean shook his head quickly. He risked looking over at Past-Cas again. It was a mistake. He couldn’t look away. “No,’ he said. “I was just really worried about you. That’s all. It’s been a long day.”

“Oh,” said Past-Cas. “You need to sleep. Humans require sleep to execute basic functions and maintain psychological coherence. I am keeping you from this. You should have said.”

“Yeah,” agreed Young Dean, tone bittersweet. “I need sleep.”

“Then I’ll go,” said Past-Cas. “There are some things I should do.” He remained where he was.

“You could stay for a bit,” said Young Dean, though he knew he shouldn’t. Not because he worried he’d mess up and press for too much. Rather because he was torturing himself in gradations by being near Past-Cas at all. “Stay till I fall asleep or something.”

“That is something you would like?” asked Past-Cas.

Young Dean nodded. “Yeah. It’s something I like. Like yesterday. It was nice.” Last night he’d fallen asleep without fighting it. Dreamless and easy. Woke up better for it.

“Then I’ll stay,” said Past-Cas.

It was almost strange that there was no awkwardness, no self-conscious doubt. It was so achingly easy to rest his head against Past-Cas, who sat up against the wrought-iron headboard. Easy to let the angel pull a blanket higher over Young Dean’s shoulder, to have Past-Cas’ fingers glide through his hair. As near as Young Dean dared to get.

It was purportedly in the interests of getting him to sleep, but for a few long moments it had the opposite effect. To sleep would bring this to an end, the last thing he wanted. He was already going to have to give it up far too soon. It was like what Past-Cas told him about on the cliff-side. He regretted learning it because now he could identify it for what it was: viparinama-dukkha. How he half-hated this beloved moment because he knew it would end. A sweet and terrible suffering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » apparently, Dean's love-language is daydreaming about the future and pretending he doesn't mean it seriously when he really really does  
> » just taking a moment to say thanks for the lovely comments so far. I really love to hear about what works and resonates, and it makes me so keen to share what's next  
> » ch. 6 title reference: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem,” but also very much Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse.” read both these short poems, then compare & contrast in under 500 words. points assigned for style. turn over your examination papers when complete.


	7. whereof one cannot speak

They all had a late start the next morning. Nothing seemed to get off the ground in the expected time, whether that was prising Reid Jenkins off the couch and sending him on his way, or Essie getting call after call from fellow hunters. She hadn’t been wrong about yesterday’s winds stirring up the supernatural, and all the local hunters considered Essie the first person to consult in anything witchy or demonic. Meanwhile, Claire was less than a day’s drive out from Carmel to reach Jody, which would give them another set of wheels and another skilled set of hands on the job.

They had Past-Cas’ powers on their side again, which would be helpful when they knew where to go, but it felt like they were starting from square one. They laid maps of the Sierra Nevada mountains out on the island in the kitchen, trying to track down reports of abandoned mines or underground tunnels that the Arimaspians might favour. Seeing the Santa Lucia compound gave them a better idea of what to look out for, but it was still a significant stretch of land to cover.

It was just past noon and they hadn’t settled on a course. Young Dean and Jody were making a case for starting their search at a stretch of road that had been closed off for a decade when Dean’s phone rang.

He looked at the screen in disbelief. “That’s Sam,” he said, rising to stand, immediately pacing as he answered it. “Sam?”

“Dean? Dean! You can hear me?” Sam’s voice came over the line, eager and surprised and louder than strictly necessary.

“I can hear you, Sam. Where the hell are you?”

There was a muffled sound of wind, of distortion. A gentle _thwump_. Then, “I dropped the phone. I dropped the phone. Can you hear me?”

“Where _are_ you?” Dean asked.

“Death Valley?” said Sam. “I think.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Long story,” said Sam. “Look, I got away from those one-eyed dicks but the rental car died in the middle of the desert. I don’t know where I am. I haven’t had signal. I climbed to the top of this hill for a better lookout when suddenly I got one bar. You can still hear me?”

“Yeah, I can hear you, Sam. Look, how do I get to you?”

“You should probably call emergency services?” said Sam. “I, uh, I sent up a signal.”

“What kind of signal?” Dean asked. He was already gesturing for Past-Cas to come closer, to be at the ready.

He could hear the wince over the phoneline. “I lit the car on fire.”

Dean was silent for a moment. “He lit the rental car on fire,” he repeated, very quietly. Then, “Alright, Sam, we’re sending someone out there for you. We’ll see you sooner than you think.” He ended the call and looked to Past-Cas. “He’s somewhere in Death Valley. You’re looking for a burning car, and a guy about yea high standing on top of some hill nearby.”

Past-Cas didn’t wait for further direction. He disappeared from the room.

Dean was still looking down at the phone in his hand. “He lit the car on fire,” he said once more. “Son of a bitch. I don’t know if he’s an idiot or a genius.”

It was only a few minutes later that the sound of angel wings announced Past-Cas once more, this time with a very dusty Sam in tow.

“Whoa,” said Sam, getting his sea legs again. He carefully set the heavy egg-box down on the floor, then looked from Past-Cas to the rest of the room. “Whoa,” he said again. Two Deans, two Castiels, one Jody (noted with a look of clear relief), and one near-total stranger.

“Sammy,” said Young Dean, face lit up with relief.

“Teen-Dean? You’re back.”

“Came to find you, kid,” said Young Dean, coming forward to greet Sam with a hug.

Sam returned it gamely, even if the confusion never left his face. He looked at the angel beside him. “And this is…”

“This is Past-Cas,” said Young Dean. “He’s Cas from my time. He was my ride here, basically.”

It said something of how much mystifying bullshit they faced on the regular that Sam didn’t look completely overwhelmed by this information. He glanced over Past-Cas once, nodding, then said, “Nice threads,” for lack of anything better. “Changing it up.”

“It’s a different vessel,” said Past-Cas, deadpan. “You wouldn’t notice, though.”

Sam nodded along, looking briefly to the Dean from his own time, who simply shrugged because really, it was all beyond explanation.

“Jody, you’re alright,” Sam said next. “I had no idea what happened to you.”

“All good,” Jody said easily. “Essie found me. Past-Cas patched me up. I’ve spent the rest of the time trying to keep up with the sheer chaos of,” she made an encircling gesture with her hand, “this whole situation.”

“Yeah,” said Sam. “About that. What happened?” He held up one finger. “Actually, no. If it’s not urgent, I need to shower.” He was covered in desert dust and a few days’ grime. His nose and the tips of his ears were burned red from the sun. “Essie? Good to meet you. Is this your place? Is it alright if I…?”

“Come with me, honey,” said Essie. “They can wait.” She led Sam off, cheerfully filling Sam in as to where they were, geographically, in the same even-keeled manner with which she provided the location of the towels and shower.

“He still has the egg,” said Dean, eyeing the box on the floor.

“This is a griffin egg?” asked Past-Cas. He crouched down and opened the box without invitation. Young Dean drifted closer, looking at it again. Time was messed up, for him more than anyone, but slaying the griffin and taking the egg felt like it happened a lifetime ago. He’d forgotten the egg’s colouring and size, its oblong, almost conical proportions.

“Is it okay?” Young Dean asked. He didn’t know whether the question even mattered. He couldn’t help himself, though.

Past-Cas put a hand against the shell. “There is something growing in there,” he said. “It is living.” He looked over the careful padding in the box, as well as the numerous protective sigils. He looked over his shoulder at Castiel. “You prepared this box well,” he said.

“I’m not as strong as you,” said Cas. “But I know as much and more.”

Past-Cas didn’t seem to take this personally. He gave a faint nod of consideration, then closed up the box. “It’s safer if it is left closed,” he said to Young Dean. “It has great internal power. There’s something about this egg that is like a beacon.”

“It’s growing stronger,” Cas said, tipping his head thoughtfully. “It was nearly impossible to trace a week ago.”

“Is it hatching?” Young Dean asked.

“Let’s hope not,” said Dean. “I don’t think any of us are prepared for ‘How to Train Your Griffin.’” Dean began to open cupboards and check the fridge, pulling out items to start making some food. Now that Sam was no longer missing, getting him fed was the new priority.

“The longer I go without seeing another one of those, the better,” said Young Dean. He winced. “I killed its parent. I made it a griffin-orphan.”

“It would’ve grown up with a taste for mountain-hikers,” said Past-Cas. “If that gives you any reassurance.”

“Some,” Young Dean agreed.

Sam returned from his shower in fresh clothes. His skin was deeply marked with tan lines from what he’d been wearing that morning, but he looked more whole again. He plugged his charger and phone into a wall, then sat in at the kitchen island.

“So, who wants to fill me in on this situation?” he asked, gesturing at Young Dean and Past-Cas.

“No way,” said Dean. He set a bowl of tortilla chips and homemade salsa in front of Sam. Essie had been good enough to give him the recipe. “You been out of contact for _days_ , man. We didn’t know if you were dead or what. You go first.”

“There’s not a lot to tell,” said Sam, scooping a chip through the salsa. “Jody and I made it to the meeting-point in Yosemite, which was clearly a trap. I thought we’d get out of there without a skirmish, but no luck.” He took a bite, paused. “Damn, that is good,” he said. He swallowed down the mouthful of food and continued. “They knocked both of us out, but I think the only reason they took me prisoner was because I knew how to unlock the box.”

“It wasn’t locked,” said Past-Cas. He wore that slightly aggravated look, the one he adopted when a hypothesis didn’t work out. The future gave him many opportunities for this.

“Not for us,” said Castiel. “Like I said. I’ve learned a few things.”

“Keeping the box locked was my only leverage,” said Sam. “And they weren’t about to try anything funny to crack it that would put the egg at risk.”

“What about the sword?” Young Dean asked. “That’s what we got the egg for. To trade.”

Sam shook his head. “They didn’t have it,” he said. He put on a composed front, but this information was a blow. “They’ve never had it. The sword has been missing for centuries.”

“But the demons were after it too,” said Young Dean. “The ones we ran into on the mountain.”

Sam frowned and shook his head. “Actually, I’m not so sure they were,” he said. “At first I thought the Arimaspoi double-crossed us and hired demons to do the same work, with the same prize on offer. But now I wonder if the demons weren’t just after the egg itself.”

“What, everybody wants a pet griffin now?” Dean asked.

“There’s something else to this egg, man,” said Sam.

“Goo goo g’joob,” said Young Dean. He smiled at his own wit, looking around for a pleased reaction. “‘I Am the Walrus?’ No one? Okay.”

“How’d you get away?” Dean asked, setting a glass of water in front of Sam, who accepted it gratefully.

“There was so much infighting with those guys,” said Sam. “It wasn’t hard to play them off each other and get free. I would’ve been fine if the car didn’t break down in the middle of the desert.”

“At which point,” said Dean, “you really thought the best thing was to light it on fire.”

“I don’t think there was anybody within a hundred miles of me,” said Sam. “It was my best option.”

“I’m not sure I can let you near Baby for a while,” said Dean. “She might sense what you did.” 

Sam rolled his eyes. “Ridiculous. Now. What I _really_ want to know,” he said, reaching forward for another few chips. “What is Teen-Dean doing back here?”

Young Dean opened his mouth to start answering, but Dean got there first. “The little punk got a taste of the future and couldn’t give it up,” said Dean.

“I started remembering,” said Young Dean. “I was supposed to forget everything that happened, but it came back. So I introduced myself to Cas from my time—”

“And he tricked me into coming here,” said Past-Cas. “He said that it was a command from the future. He neglected to mention that in the future we are at odds with God and that Heaven isn’t in any position to be issuing orders.”

“And you didn’t up and smite him for that?” Sam asked. “I’m impressed.”

“Unfortunately, I have an acute and persistent weakness for Dean Winchester,” said Past-Cas with monotone candour.

Sam swallowed a tortilla chip wrong and coughed.

“He made a sad face,” Past-Cas continued. “So I instantly forgave him.”

The other heads in the room turned to Past-Cas, helplessly frozen.

“I understand this is part of a pattern beyond my ability to curb.”

Sam slowly nodded. “Wow,” he said. “It really is the Past Cas.” He did a poor job of training back a smile. “You and Dean do share a more profound bond.”

“You understand,” said Past-Cas with a note of satisfaction. He liked when everyone was on the same page.

“How long have you been back here?” Sam asked, looking at Young Dean.

“A few days. Past-Cas and I met Claire, caught up with Dean and Cas in Wyoming, then came straight here to Jody.” He leaned forward against the island, arms folded, eyes lighting up. “Man, so much has happened. When we were looking for you, we followed this lead that took us all through the Santa Lucia mountains. And at sunset, just when we were about to pack it in, all these Dark Watchers showed up, like, a million of them.”

“Not as fun as he’s making it sound,” said Dean with a shake of his head.

“And they asked us to go take down the Arimaspian compound since they were, like, squatters on their land, basically. So Dean blew it up, which _I_ didn’t get to see, so that sucked. And Past-Cas got cursed by them, which sucked worse, but luckily Essie knew a guy with lion jizz—long story—so we got him all cured up. And then you came back. Man, it’s been a _wild_ hunt.”

It had been a long time since Dean debriefed Sam on a hunt like that, excited about something new, excited in his own sense of accomplishment. Sam put on a faint smile, bittersweet. Hunting was their life and always had been, and some hunts were awful and some were invigorating, but lately the stakes had been so high there wasn’t time to feel good about what went right. Young Dean didn’t know that yet.

“Sounds like I missed a lot,” said Sam.

“Oh,” said Young Dean, laughing. “You got no idea.”

Dean, walking by him, punched his arm on the way. “Ow! Asshole,” Young Dean scowled at Dean’s back. He couldn’t even say aloud that he hadn’t been about to tell Sam anything about Dean and Cas.

“Back to the facts. We don’t have the sword,” Dean said, reining the conversation back in. “You heard from Eileen?”

Sam’s face went drawn, glancing over to his charging phone. “She’s answering texts again,” he said. “She says she’s fine. Told me in no uncertain terms to keep my nose out of it.”

“Which we’re not doing,” said Dean. “Come on, she knows better than to think that.”

“I just thought we had the answer with that sword,” said Sam.

“What about the egg?”

“It seems powerful, but I don’t know if it does the same thing,” said Sam. “I overheard some of what the Arimaspoi were saying about it. Something to do with an entity called Abrasax?”

“Abrasax?” said Dean. “Isn’t he that asshole demon Mom dealt with? Who went after the Girl Scouts?”

“That was Abraxas,” said Cas. “Abrasax… Essie and I came across that name over and over in the Greek Magical Papyri. It’s associated with all manner of Gnostic spells and beliefs.”

“You remember anything about an egg in there?” said Dean.

“It wasn’t what we were searching for at the time,” said Cas.

“Research,” said Young Dean with a sigh, resting his head against a hand, fingers rumpled through his hair. “This means research again.”

For his part, Sam nerded out over the resources in Essie’s collection, not to mention her meticulously cross-referenced notes. The Men of Letters bunker was well-stocked, to be sure, but it ground to a halt in the mid-50s. Not only had long-lost manuscripts and papyri been rediscovered since that time, methods of indexing and organizing had changed too. Essie’s system wasn’t fancy by any means, but it was robust, and far more current than what the Men of Letters had to offer.

“Abrasax,” Essie said. “It sounds so familiar to me, not just from looking through spells yesterday. I just can’t place where I’ve read it.” Like any hunter worth her salt, Essie kept a journal. Or, rather, journals. She was partway into Volume Seven. Convinced she’d heard the name before, she worked her way through her own written journals as well as correspondence and email threads with other hunters.

They read through the afternoon, making multiple stacks of notes on the different potential meanings and powers of this Abrasax and what it might have to do with a griffin egg. The angels served for the bulk of the translation work, and got through more reading than anyone else could. Whenever Dean got tired of reading he’d pace and posit arguments.

Young Dean was trying hard to be useful, but it was so clear that he had too much pent-up energy to focus. Dean knew the signs. The bouncing leg, the frequent glances up at other faces as if he hoped for news, then the determined settling in again with a furrowed brow, focused posture. Until it inevitably dissolved into hands raking through his hair, stifling a sigh.

Dean leaned his arm on Jody’s chair. “Somebody needs to take Teen-Dean for a walk,” he said. “He’s going to burst.”

“You’re nominating me?” Jody asked. “Not that I’m complaining of a break.”

“I figure he’s probably tired of me,” said Dean. “And you’ve been on library duty the past couple days. You should see a bit of the town. I’ll give him some spending money.”

Jody smiled. “That teenager is going to walk all over you, Dean,” she said.

“Well, tell him he’s only going out because we need groceries. So it feels a little like a chore, at least.”

“You’re getting there,” said Jody. She slid her laptop away across the table. “We’ll head out now, to get back before Claire comes. Give me a few minutes to get ready.”

“He’ll meet you at the door,” Dean said.

He crossed to Young Dean as Jody left the room, patting a hand against his shoulder. “It’s your lucky break, kid,” he said. “Jody wants you for a grocery run.”

“Really?” Dean half-wished Young Dean would do a better job of hiding the desperate relief on his face.

“I’m guessing you’re up for it?”

“Can Past-Cas come?” Young Dean asked. Both Castiels looked over with mild curiosity at hearing their name.

“Not this time, sport,” said Dean. “We need all the Greek speakers we can get. Come on, I’ll get you some grocery money.”

Young Dean followed Dean out of the library. Dean has his wallet in the pocket of a jacket in the hall. It was good just to get out of the quiet reading room for a while.

“When are you going to tell Sam?” Young Dean asked, a glance around confirming they were the only ones nearby.

Dean paused, wallet flipped open in his hand. He started to thumb through the different credit cards. “About Cas?” he said, not looking at Young Dean. He took a card out of its pocket and tapped it idly against the inside of the wallet.

“Yeah, about Cas,” said Young Dean. “You should tell him soon. It’s not fair that Jody knows and he doesn’t.”

“I’ll tell him in my own time,” said Dean.

“Dean,” said Young Dean, half-plaintive, half-judging. “It won’t get easier, waiting. Just get it over with.”

“It’s not that easy,” said Dean. “You wouldn’t know.”

“I told Bobby,” said Young Dean.

Dean’s head jerked up. He wore a complicated expression, like he wanted to be angry, but like worry fought with wonder instead. “What?” His voice wasn’t as loud or confident as it had been in his head. “When?”

“Soon as I reached Sioux Falls,” said Young Dean. “I was telling him all about time travel, the griffin, the whole story, and it just… came out naturally.”

“What’d he say?” Dean’s voice was tight. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Young Dean, studying every minor movement and expression like it would reveal something more. His eyes were at once stern and glassy.

“He just…” Young Dean looked down, giving a faint shake of his head as he thought back to that moment from barely a week ago. Twenty-two years ago. “It wasn’t much, but it felt like a lot. He just put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘That’s okay, son.’”

Dean nodded his head a few times. Then a few more. He paced away, pinching the bridge of his nose. Young Dean did the respectful thing and turned his face away, letting his eyes dance around the many sigils around the door. Meanwhile Dean sniffed in a breath, said, “Okay,” to himself under his breath, then, “Okay,” once more.

“How is Bobby?” Young Dean asked at last. He risked turning his attention back to Dean.

Dean stopped again at that, but he kept himself restrained this time. “He died a while ago,” he said. “Helping us in yet another of the stupid fucking disasters we half-brought on ourselves. You don’t know it yet. To you he’s dad’s buddy, when they’re talking at least. A good hunter, someone you can trust when everything else has gone to hell. But you don’t know yet that… that Bobby’s family.” Dean kept the hard, thoughtful look on his face, because he was already too close to sentimentality. Too close to breaking apart. “Dad tells you how important family is. That’s why it’s your job to take care of Sammy, that’s why he needs you as his second, and why you got no choice but to stay and follow orders. He doesn’t tell you that family don’t end in blood.” His jaw twitched as he swallowed hard. “But you’ll learn that. And it’ll make all the difference.”

Young Dean kept his chin high, his gaze level, but a troubled look took over his features. He knew himself too well, and knew how much pain existed beneath those strained words and tightly guarded expressions. He knew that the effort Dean put into hiding that pain only spoke to its sheer gravity. “That’s what’s happened here, isn’t it?” Young Dean asked at last. “A family. With Claire and Jack and Jody and Eileen. And _Cas_. That’s what I’ve been feeling this whole time. Been missing. I thought it was just Cas alone. It would be enough. But it’s so much bigger than that.”

Dean considered this, conceding with a nod. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. You’re probably right about that.”

“Just one more thing to add to the list,” said Young Dean. “The things that would make me better if I remembered.”

“Better to learn it late in life than never at all,” said Dean.

“I guess,” said Young Dean.

“Look, this got heavy,” said Dean. “We were supposed to be taking your mind off things.” He opened his wallet again, passing over the credit card. “That’s for groceries,” he said. He passed over some bills as well. “That’s for spending. Whatever you want. Just make sure you treat Jody with it, too. Get some ice cream or something. Have a good time.”

“A good time, yeah. You really know how to set the tone,” said Young Dean.

“You were the one who brought up Bobby,” said Dean.

“Which, speaking of,” said Young Dean, raising one finger. “You need to tell Sam. Do it while I’m out.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” said Dean. “I’ll tell him when I tell him.”

“You’re so unfair to Cas,” said Young Dean.

Dean scowled. “Oh, what do you know?”

“Cas is Sam’s friend too,” said Young Dean. “Actually, I kinda like it, you know? That they just get along like that. And they both have someone else they can go to when they want to be nerds about research.”

“That is a plus,” Dean acknowledged.

“So you’ll tell him?”

“Mind your own business,” said Dean, playfully shoving at Young Dean’s head. Young Dean laughed and batted his arm away.

“Is this what happens when you’re left unsupervised?” Jody asked, stepping quickly down the stairs and towards the entrance. “Do we get to place bets on who wins?”

“Teen-Dean’s learned not to think he can beat me,” Dean said. “I kicked his ass in the fight ring.”

“That’s not true,” said Young Dean. “You can’t listen to him, Jody. The old man gets forgetful sometimes.”

“I’ll show you forgetful,” said Dean, but he merely grinned and patted Young Dean’s shoulder on the way out.

Dean returned to Essie’s cramped library, slowing when he reached the doorway. Sam cross-referenced the book in his lap with something on his laptop, which rested on the low arm of a beat-up wingback chair. He could ask him to step outside, say he wanted to ask about something. Essie wouldn’t care, the angels wouldn’t care. They were all too polite and immersed in their research to bother about it.

Young Dean was right that he should get it over with. That it wouldn’t get any easier. Instead Dean sat down where Jody had been and took over from where she left off, wishing he’d been the one to go for a walk instead.  


* * *

  
Despite all her enthusiasm for research, Essie was the one to close up her journals and call it a night. “Library’s closing,” she said. “You don’t get anywhere by breaking your brain over old books. We could all do with some time to enjoy ourselves.”

And so they descended on the kitchen again, making food and exchanging banter, theories about Abrasax rising up despite their supposed commitment not to think about research. When the doorbell rang, Dean went to answer it. Young Dean and Cas, both temporarily free of a kitchen task, followed as Dean opened the door to Claire.

Young Dean hadn’t forgotten his brief meeting with Claire. This time she wore a leather jacket and heavier makeup. She still carried herself like she had the world’s biggest chip on her shoulder, but Young Dean saw the way a smile softened her face as she hugged Dean, then Cas.

“You’ve met young me,” said Dean.

Young Dean gave a laid-back wave. “Hey again.”

“Hey,” said Claire. She wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “It’s even weirder when you’re both here,” she said, and she looked back up at Dean, her Dean. “Must be some hunt, huh?”

“I don’t even know where to start explaining,” said Dean with a shake of his head.

“Jody here?” Claire asked.

“In the kitchen, come on,” said Dean. He put his arm easily around her, a hand on her shoulder. He walked her to the kitchen and asked with apparent engagement about her drive: if she’d seen the price of gas coming in, where she got on the highway, where she got off the highway.

She put up with it admirably, Young Dean thought. “He’s turned into such a dad,” Young Dean said to Cas.

The look in Cas’ eyes turned a shade warmer. “You think?”

“If you put him anywhere near a barbeque right now, he’d be throwing on brats and dispensing terrible life advice,” said Young Dean. “He called me ‘ _sport_ ’ today.”

Cas laughed. And then he put a hand on Young Dean’s shoulder, just the same as Dean had done with Claire, to bring him back to the kitchen. “He’d disagree with you,” said Cas. “But I might not. You don’t mind it? That is you, one day.”

Young Dean looked at Cas with a shade of wonder. Sometimes the more he got to know Dean the more different he felt from him, but then something would happen that snapped it all back into line again. One day, Young Dean would be _that_. Someone’s father-figure, trying his best to be a good man. Maybe not perfect, maybe not conventional, but he’d have these de facto kids he’d love who’d love him back. It wasn’t something he’d properly pictured for himself before, which meant he knew the anxiety and self-doubt Dean inevitably felt about his role. But Young Dean had seen with his own eyes how naturally it came, and it was more than a comfort. It was a promise.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “He doesn’t either.”

They moved from kitchen to living room, platters of food assembled in waves and shared over beer and wine. Dean was getting up for another drink, taking Essie and Jody’s glasses with him into the kitchen for refills on the way. The open bottle of wine sat on the island with only a mouthful left in the bottom. With no one around, he tipped it back to finish it off without the trouble of a glass, making a face at the peppery taste. He had no fucking idea if it was good or bad.

There was another bottle of the same wine, unopened, on the counter. He managed to remove the foil alright, but Essie’s only corkscrew was one of those complicated ones that waiters used. He didn’t think it would be beyond him, but his first attempt simply skewered the top half of the stopper.

Sam entered the kitchen then with an empty beer bottle and a bowl to refill with chips.

“You know how to work this thing?” Dean asked. He was pretty sure you wanted the cork out all in one go and it was too late for that. At least with the way the night was going, they probably wouldn’t need to worry about resealing the wine.

“Uh,” said Sam. He took the corkscrew. “I think you just…” His solution involved merely digging the screw in deeper, then trying to pull up with brute force. Half the remaining cork fell into the wine.

“It’s kinda open,” said Sam. As the marginally more sophisticated of the two, his pride was likely more injured. “We’ll strain it. We’ll strain it.”

“Strain it how?”

“I don’t know how, Dean. Okay, we’ll just…” Sam poured, very slowly, around the cork that remained lodged in the neck of the bottle and used a clean spoon to chase the tiny bits of cork out of Essie and Jody’s glasses.

“The Winchester brothers,” said Sam, pathetically shaking the last bits of cork from his spoon into the sink. “Defeated by a corkscrew.”

“Why couldn’t it just be a screwtop?” said Dean. “We don’t speak of this to anyone.”

“I don’t think either of us expected to win a prize for excellence in domestic skill any time soon,” said Sam.

“Nah,” said Dean.

And if he thought of Cas at the mere mention of domesticity, what of it?

“Sam,” Dean said.

Sam took a bottle of beer from the fridge, reached for another for Dean. “Yeah?”

Dean didn’t want to tell him. And he wanted to tell him more than anything. He should just be able to repeat what he told Jody, word for word. Just to say, _something’s changed recently_ , and _I thought people should know_.

Sam shouldered the fridge closed and looked at him expectantly.

Dean glanced at the doorway that led to the other room. Cas was in there, slowly drinking a beer that would never affect him. Young Dean and Past-Cas too, fond with each other if you knew what to look for. Dean didn’t want one of them giving it away before he had the chance, and yet he couldn’t say it.

“Nothin’,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Dean, what?” said Sam.

“I said it’s nothing,” said Dean. “This is a good night. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“Okay. You can’t say you don’t want to ruin the night and then tell me it’s nothing,” said Sam.

Fuck, he had a good point. Goddam lawyer. Dean didn’t know why he tried.

“It’s to do with Cas,” said Dean, not looking at Sam, still waiting for someone to walk through that door and successfully distract them both from this moment. He would love it if Sam could just forget all this happened. If Dean could pick any moment for a time travel spell, he’d return to just before he mangled the cork stopper.

“Our Cas?” said Sam. “I mean, not the past version?”

“Our Cas,” said Dean. His Cas. “It’s me and him.” He ground to a stop.

Sam’s stance eased after a moment. “I think I know what you’re trying to say,” he said, an attempt to prompt Dean on more than anything.

Dean looked at him again, his expression a little guarded. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think you do.” Sam would have no reason to even suspect. Dean had played his role so carefully all this time that there was no way for Sam to guess. And although Dean should say more, he again found he couldn’t.

Sam leaned his hip against the counter, sighing and chewing his tongue. “Look, don’t hold this against him, but Teen-Dean… He told me about it. He, basically, came out to me.”

“He what? When?”

“Really early on. First time here. He thought you and Cas were together. When he tried to ask me about it, he sort of… admitted the way he felt.”

“That son of a bitch,” said Dean.

“That was you, Dean,” said Sam. “Need I remind you. Not some other person, or alternate-reality-Dean. Straight up, you.”

“Well he had no right to run his mouth,” said Dean.

“Can I tell you what I told him?” said Sam. He took his hip away from the counter to stand straighter. “Dean, I am totally supportive. I want you to be happy. If you and Cas have moved forward with something, I think that’s good. Real good. For both of you.”

Dean’s eyes roamed the kitchen, looking everywhere but Sam. “Yeah, well,” he said. “We have. Moved forward with something.”

Sam laughed. “You make it sound like such a trial. You heard the part where I want you to be happy, right?”

“I am,” said Dean. Still completely stone-faced. “I’m happy about it.” He took in a breath. “I just… It’s different. Because… Because it’s serious. He’s it, for me.”

Sam, who had known Dean through all his years of posturing and playboy antics, raised his brows in surprise. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Dean Winchester: settled at last.”

Dean still didn’t quite look at Sam, but a mild smile took to his face, alongside a hint of a familiar, playful light in his eyes. “I don’t think there’s any world where I’d call this ‘settling.’”

“I forgot you can’t do things by halves,” Sam half-groaned. “You’re going to be obnoxious about this, aren’t you?”

Dean shrugged his shoulders, the impish grin growing.

“Come on, Jeeves,” said Dean with a nod to the glasses of wine. “Get the wine out before they start thinking we’re amateurs who can’t operate a corkscrew.”

“Or worse,” said Sam. “They’ll think we’re in here talking about feelings. That would be terrible.”

Dean scowled at him. “It is terrible,” he said. “If I have to do much more of this, I’m gonna be sick.”

“Does Teen-Dean know?” Sam asked, refilling the chip bowl and taking it up alongside Jody’s wine glass. “He’s been rooting for you this whole time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Dean. “He’s half to blame.”

“What about Past-Cas?”

“Kid’s got a whole thing about Past-Cas,” said Dean. “But there’s a vessel in the way, so they’ve got this Romeo and Juliet act going.”

“You know that had a real downer ending, right?”

“I know. That’s why it fits. How could this not?” said Dean. “That’s what a tragedy is, right? Just a fate you’ll never escape.”

“I think you just earned a BA, for that,” said Sam.

“And I’m about due for a Masters of Physics with how mind-fucked this time travelling makes me,” said Dean. “Because soon he’s going to go back to the right time, but all the stuff he’s going through now? It’s already happened to me, only I didn’t know it. And there’s stuff that hasn’t even happened yet, like whatever comes up tomorrow, that I’ve already been through and forgotten about. How fucked up is _that_?”

“We are _not_ thinking about the consequences of time travel until we have to,” said Sam.

He was right. Tonight there were better things to think about. They rejoined the party, Dean’s eyes finding Cas as soon as they entered the room. There was a question in Cas’ gaze. An answer in the wink that Dean shot him. Meanwhile Young Dean, Claire, and Past-Cas sat on the floor around a coffee table where Claire showed them mystifying depths of modern tech and the internet.

Claire tucked her hair behind her ear, eyes briefly following Dean’s movements as he sat beside Cas on the couch, hip-to-hip. She’d always been observant, but it didn’t take a detective to pick up on the unspoken debriefing in the quiet smiles they exchanged, or the way Dean’s eyes lingered ardently on Cas’ profile when Cas went back to his engrossing conversation with Essie.

And then there was the pair next to her, whose dynamic was even more screwed up than any outsider could guess. She turned her phone over on the table and reached for her beer. “This is still weird,” she said. “I can’t believe this is what my dad looked like at my age.” She gestured at her own neck, while looking at the golden necklace on Past-Cas. “The dorky little cross? Really?”

“This isn’t your father,” said Past-Cas, angling his head to the side.

“What?”

“Though close in appearance,” he said, looking down at himself. “Jimmy was not prepared to hear me, when I arrived. This is your Uncle Lawry.”

“Dad’s brother? That’s…” Her expression shifted to something not troubled, but wary. “I don’t remember him. I was only two when he died.”

“He remembers you,” said Past-Cas. “He adored you.”

Claire narrowed her eyes. “No. Weird. No more of that.”

Past-Cas nodded his head in understanding.

“You’re different this time,” said Claire. “Last time, it took you a while to become… considerate.”

Past-Cas’ eyes went tellingly to Young Dean. “I had to come to terms with matters much more quickly,” he said. “And I’m out of contact with Heaven. I suppose that being without orders to follow affects my priorities.”

“It’s better this way,” Claire said. She wrapped her arms around her knees. “You’re going to return my uncle to the correct time, right?” she said. “What was it, ‘98?”

“Yeah,” said Young Dean. “We have to wait a few more days before he’s got the strength to travel with Lawry again, but we’ll go back once we can. It’ll be November we return to. Your uncle… He doesn’t have much longer. I’m sorry about that, Claire.”

Claire gave a faint shake of her head, too much of a realist to resist. “It is the way it is,” she said. “It’s weird, though. Uncle Lawry dying, my dad always said that was what brought him closer to his faith. Is this something Lawrence remembers?”

“We don’t know,” Young Dean said uneasily, still unsure of the close timing between this adventure and Lawry’s death.

“I do know, actually,” said Past-Cas. He suddenly had the attention of not just Young Dean and Claire, but the others as well, conversations dropping away. He looked around with a wide-eyed expression. “I didn’t know when to share this,” he said falteringly.

“Share what?” said Dean from his place on the couch.

“I've spent most nights looking into it. It was clear as soon as I arrived that Lawrence Novak’s fate meant something to all of you,” said Past-Cas. “I didn’t understand why, but you all immediately decided to bear the guilt for it. I thought it would be some assurance to myself,” he gestured to Castiel, “and the Deans if I were to investigate.”

“And?” said Young Dean. He was the one who had dragged Lawry into this, with his insistence on going to the future. Cas, too, had gone still with his attention.

“I’ve concluded he had no memory of this,” said Past-Cas. “If he even remembers my request, perhaps he thought it all a dream. The day that Teen-Dean and I departed, the day that we will return to, he went to work as usual. An annual performance review later that month praised his consistency. His neighbours and friends noticed no changes in behaviour. His death, sadly inevitable, was a result of poor timing and slick roads.”

Past-Cas’ eyes wandered unseeingly along the edge of the coffee table. “Angel possession can have a terrible effect on vessels, and I would not now easily make the decision to take one. But the Novak line seems particularly resilient.” He looked up at Claire. “To see him like this must be a burden to you, Claire. I’m sorry for that.”

“You really have changed,” said Claire.

“I won’t remember it,” said Past-Cas. “Though if I could choose differently, I would.”

“Wouldn’t we all?” she said. She looked at Young Dean. “What about you? You said this was your second visit to the future. What was so great you couldn’t get enough?”

Young Dean’s lips parted at the question. He looked at Dean and Cas, who didn’t even have to touch each other to look like longtime partners, easy with one another and naturally gravitating close. At Sam, the brother who’d leave him but then come back and fight forever at his side. Claire, the daughter he didn’t know he wanted. And Jody, man, Young Dean didn’t take her for granted. Dean had such a comfortable bond of friendship and trust with her, like he’d forgotten that once upon a time, friends such as her were an impossibility from a practical point of view. And then new people, like Essie, opening her house to them just because she knew she could help, and that made it the right thing to do.

It proved the lie that formed the basis of everything his father had made him believe. That a man was stronger on his own. That relationships were weak spots. That a good hunter knew better than to trust anybody. He hadn’t known it at the time and wouldn’t figure it out again for years, but that stubborn mindset of cynicism and privation was no way to live.

“Everything,” he said. He looked at Past-Cas. “Just everything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » Sam’s back! I missed Sam, and so did the Deans. it’s in their nature  
> » y’all I can’t believe that, barring catastrophe, this will be over this time next week  
> » ch. 7 title reference: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus Logicao-Philosophicus_. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”


	8. you are what you are, you are who you are

They were making motions about leaving the next morning, with no reason to linger in Southern California. Essie’s hospitality had been more than generous, and her library valuable, but it was time to turn to the Men of Letters books to see if anything more on Abrasax could be found there. Claire and Jody hoped to make an early start of it, meanwhile Dean tried to casually lay out a plan in which Past-Cas teleported Young Dean and Sam to the bunker and left Cas and Dean to drive back over a few days. It was, he thought, a very good plan.

Essie, filling the cistern of the coffee maker for the second time that morning, suddenly stopped pouring. “Abrasax,” she said. “Abraxas.”

“Nah,” said Dean, overhearing. “Abraxas was a demon. He’s taken care of.”

“Abraxas,” she repeated. “Hold on. I _knew_ I knew it.” She handed Dean the carafe half-filled with water and abruptly left the room. Not for her library of hunter’s texts, but to another part of the house.

“Okay,” said Dean. He took over making the coffee, shooting a look over his shoulder. “I’m starting to trust her hunches,” he said.

“Believe me,” said Jody, peeling an orange and handing Claire half. “Essie’s sudden hunches are better informed than most people’s lifelong pursuits.”

Essie came back with a book. Not a scroll or leather-bound tome or her hunter’s journal, but a small paperback novel with a funny-looking cover. She flipped rapidly through the pages as she walked, coming to stop at the kitchen island, where she leaned on her elbows to read aloud. “Here it is,” she said. “I should’ve thought of it sooner.” She cleared her throat once before reciting: “‘The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to god. The name of the god is Abraxas.’”

She looked up at them, her dark brown eyes enlivened with excitement.

No one said anything for a moment. Dean expected the others to have a better idea than him what it meant, but he wasn’t alone in his confusion. Sam’s eyes raised upwards and moved as if he was reciting the passage over to himself to absolutely no avail. Cas and Past-Cas wore identically furrowed expressions, heads tilted in uncanny mirroring.

“Abraxas was a demon, Essie,” Dean said again. “Not a god. And we ended him.”

“I heard you the first time, Dean,” said Essie. “What Hesse calls Abraxas is the same as our Abrasax, the one we’ve been reading about. Our sources are two thousand years old. The name merely got corrupted through translation.”

“So what’s this book?” Dean asked.

“It’s _Demian_ by Hermann Hesse,” she said, lifting it in one hand to show the cover. “Abraxas is a recurring figure in it. It’s a work of fiction, of course, but Hesse got many of his ideas from the spiritual visions of Carl Jung. I think we might find our answers there, in his book _Seven Sermons to the Dead_.”

“How do you just know all that?” asked Young Dean.

“It’s all there in the Foreward,” said Essie.

“People read the Foreward?” Dean asked.

“Obviously librarians do,” said Sam. “Okay. Carl Jung. The book sounds creepy, so we’re probably on the right track. Is that something you have?”

“I have _The Red Book_. I never got to reading the whole thing, but it includes _Seven Sermons to the Dead_. This could lead us along in the right direction.”

“Okay,” said Sam, looking around at the others. “New plan? We’ll stay here a little longer, see if we can get somewhere with this Carl Jung stuff?”

Jody and Claire exchanged a brief look. “We’ve should get back to the girls,” Jody said. “You’re safe and it seems like danger’s not right around the corner, for the moment. We’ll head out as planned. But don’t do anything dumb, dangerous, and life-threatening without calling first. Got it?”

“I won’t make promises we both know I can’t keep,” said Dean.

They finished their breakfast, bid Jody and Claire farewell, then went back to research. It was different this time, making rapid progress now that they had a focus. Now that they had some traction, Young Dean was as interested as anybody. In the space of a few hours they had the right books open on the table, pages pulled up on computer screens, and notes taken down in Essie’s quick hand.

“So Abrasax is a god,” said Dean. “The kind of god we have to kill?”

“Who’s killing gods?” Young Dean asked. “We’ve done that?”

“Sometimes you gotta,” said Dean with a shrug.

“I’d say a god, yes,” said Essie, “in some ways. But not precisely. The way Hesse and Jung use it, it’s like a power, or even just a state of consciousness. The point of _Demian_ is embracing duality. Even contradiction. Instead of good versus evil, which are active opposites, good and evil exist in Abrasax without cancelling each other out. That’s what makes his power so great and so impossible to perceive.”

“That’s not so hard to buy,” said Sam thoughtfully. “Good and evil coexist in people, too.”

“Usually there’s more of one than the other,” Dean said.

“Granted,” said Sam.

“What does any of this have to do with the griffin egg?” asked Young Dean.

“Well that’s where it gets really interesting,” said Essie. “Tell him your theory, Sam.”

“Right. Well, I noticed he was going on and on about created worlds. One minute they’re solid and definite, then he’s saying they are always subject to change. Then later he mentions— where is it…” He flipped through a few pages. “Right. He says, ‘Man is a portal through which one enters from the outer world of the gods, demons and souls, into the inner world, from the greater world into the smaller world. Small and insignificant is man; one leaves him soon behind, and thus one enters once more into infinite space.’”

“I don’t know what that means,” said Dean.

“No, right, it’s nonsense,” said Sam. “Sort of. I mean, if you read it as a metaphor or a spiritual journey, then whatever. But if you take it literally… Get this: ‘In this world, man is Abraxas, who gives birth to and devours his own world.’”

“‘Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world,’” said Essie.

“‘The egg is the world,’” said Sam. “You get it? The egg. Is the world.”

Dean folded his arms, shaking his head. “I am not getting it. The egg is whose world? We gotta protect it now or something?”

“No,” said Sam. “I think… I think destroying the egg can _create_ a world. A world of man’s own making. That’s why everyone’s been after it.”

Young Dean stepped forward slowly from his place by the bookshelves. “It can create another world without destroying this one?”

“That’s what I’m getting,” said Sam.

Dean knew the look of resolution on Young Dean’s face. “Oh,” he said.

Young Dean looked between them all, standing straighter and taking in a breath. “It’s my egg,” he said. “I killed the griffin for it. I had to be… to be pure enough. If I can make a new world without hurting this one, don’t I deserve that?”

No one else seemed to find themselves fit to answer. Dean felt Sam’s eyes on him, but Dean wasn’t really seeing anything. His own past he couldn’t change, not without losing who he was. Not without risking things he didn’t want to give up. But Young Dean…

He hadn’t had an easy life. The way that John raised him and the things he faced in the hunting life burdened him. There were things he’d already done out of desperation that he couldn’t take back. When Young Dean first arrived in the future, it was clear just how used up and tainted he felt he was, despite all his youth. Coming to the future had given him some perspective, but for what? All it came with was the tragic promise of losing it again.

Dean had to say something.

“Let’s you and me take a drive, kid,” he said.

“And the rest of us?” Sam asked.

The books on the table still had a wealth of information. “See what creating a world entails. Just so we know what we’re dealing with.”

They were silent for the first fifteen minutes of their drive, chewing up the open highway with no real destination beyond.

“If this thing is even possible…” Dean said at last.

“Just say you disapprove,” said Young Dean. He looked out the window, squinting against the bright sunlight.

“I don’t,” said Dean. “That’s the thing.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t think we had a choice,” Dean said. “I didn’t like it, after the first time you came here. I knew I was sending you back to some real shitty circumstances, but our hands were tied. My life could only happen one way. I had to make all the choices I made, just like I always made them. But I couldn’t shake the feeling it was somehow unfair to you.”

“It’s okay,” said Young Dean. “I liked it in the future, but it’s not like I would’ve tried to stay long here anyway. I had to go back to Sammy.”

“Yeah,” said Dean.

“But I get a world of my own making without fucking up this one. I still go back to Sammy, I still become you. And in my new world, I go back to Sammy, but this time I’m better. I can look after him better. I can keep him from going to Hell. I can keep our family and our friends from dying.”

“I don’t know,” said Dean with a shake of his head. “I don’t know what that world will look like. We’re not gonna pretend like everything will be sunshine and roses just because you had a preview of the future. You have to know you’re taking a risk, here, too.”

“Thought you said you didn’t disapprove,” said Young Dean.

“No, listen,” said Dean. “If you do this? You and me are going to be different people.” He glanced over at that familiar face, the one like a funhouse mirror, showing him all his own features without the signs of time. “You’re going to make different choices. That’s the whole point. You’ll miss some disasters, but I know the way our lives work. There will just be others.”

“I know there’s no avoiding, like, hardship and mistakes and the messiness of the world,” said Young Dean. “But there’s things I need to change. I won’t do the things that I know hurt me any more.”

Dean pursed his lips and shook his head. “Yeah, you will,” he said. “Because someone will be in trouble and you’ll put yourself in the way. Sammy will need textbooks or a square meal, and you’ll be strapped for cash like you always are. Some big monster won’t go away without a devil’s bargain, and you’ll do the math on every person it could take and you’ll always come out last. That’s who you are.”

“What if I quit hunting?” Young Dean asked.

“You can’t,” said Dean. “You’ll hear about a suspicious death on the radio or see it in the newspaper and you won’t be able to let it go. The second death would be your fault and you’d know it. And you’d stay up at night thinking about all the people getting hurt and dying, the ones that you don’t even know about because you aren’t looking for it, and then you’ll be filling up shells with rock salt again.”

Young Dean rubbed a hand at his forehead, elbow leaning against the window ledge. “So maybe I can’t quit hunting. But… if I had Cas with me,” he said quietly.

“You want to take Past-Cas?”

“If he said yes,” said Young Dean. “If it’s even possible.”

Dean leaned back a little in the seat, looking out at the road and letting it be his only focus for a long moment.

“I don’t see why he should have to start over, there,” said Young Dean. “That’s no better than a memory-wipe. It would be something good, if me and him were on the same page from the get-go.”

“No, I see what you’re saying,” said Dean. “I think he’d say yes, even. I’m just thinking about how having him… It really would make everything different.”

“Cas didn’t seem to think so,” said Young Dean.

“You mean my Cas?”

“Yeah. We were speculating about it when you were blowing shit up.”

“Shows what he knows,” said Dean with a shake of his head. “Look, I’m crazy about the guy, obviously, but he’s got no idea sometimes. He doesn’t know, and even you don’t know… How lonely it gets. When Sam’s gone. When Dad doesn’t need us for something. Sometimes even when they are around, I’m still alone somehow: like I don’t belong to anybody. It’s like I can tell they’re going to leave me. And Cas? He wants to stay.”

“And you want him to stay.”

“More than fucking anything,” said Dean. “My point is, if I had him when I was your age? If I knew what was possible? Wouldn’t make a difference, my ass.” He slowed as he pulled into the sandy parking area of a largely-empty beach. “If he was around it would mean there’s always someone I belonged to, no matter where I was.” He put the car into park, folded his arms over the wheel, and rested his chin on top as he looked out. He’d done this before more than twenty years ago, when he still took trips out to California.

“So you’ll back me up?” Young Dean said. “On using this egg?”

“Why shouldn’t you?” said Dean. “If we don’t use it, some other asshole is just going to try and steal it from us to make their own shitty world.”

“Right,” said Young Dean. “That, or it hatches.”

“Right. And tries to eat the mountain hikers.”

“We’re just avoiding the carnage,” said Young Dean.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“We gonna stay out here for a bit?”

“We’re gonna stay out here.”

Young Dean mirrored Dean’s posture, folding his arms on the dash and resting his chin. Young Dean chewed idly on the bracelets at his wrist, a habit Dean had nearly forgotten. They were silent for a few moments, until a flapping of wings interrupted. Past-Cas appeared behind Young Dean, his hand holding Cas’ coat.

“What are we doing here?” Cas asked.

“Something wrong?” said Dean, twisting to look at the pair of them.

“Teen-Dean was asking for us,” said Past-Cas. His blue eyes were perfectly steady and dispassionate as he looked between them, coloured, perhaps, with a shade of innocence. Dean remembered that look. As if he were checking to see if he’d done the right thing, because humans could be confusing, and their actions counterintuitive. Sometimes what they wanted wasn’t what they asked for and vice-versa. Angel logic was simpler than that.

“I was just thinking about him,” Young Dean said with an unconvincing wince. “I wasn’t doing it on purpose.”

“I can pick up on a longing,” said Past-Cas, his dry expression turning into something more thoughtful as he looked at Young Dean.

“You gotta build some walls around that shit,” Dean told Young Dean. “Don’t go bothering him with everything.”

“That is terrible advice, Dean,” said Cas. He leaned forward in his seat. “Is that what you do?”

Dean rolled his eyes and avoided answering. “Teen-Dean asked for both of you?” he said.

“Yes. I think he wanted…” Past-Cas seemed more aware of their expectant looks, voice lowering and faltering over his words. “... you to have… a distraction.”

Young Dean, showing no due shame whatever, returned Dean’s glare with an expressive look, prompting him on. “Well?” said Young Dean. “Go be distracted.”

Maybe Jody was right that the teenager could walk all over him, because with no more than a disapproving grunt, Dean opened his door. “You know the rules,” he said to Young Dean. “Come on, Cas.”

Young Dean angled forward to watch Cas and Dean walk a short stretch down the beach. They came to rest with Dean leaning against the top of a picnic table that had seen better days and shifted with his weight.

“What are the rules?” Past-Cas asked, still in the seat behind Young Dean.

Young Dean sighed and got out of the car. Past-Cas didn’t bother with the door, appearing at Young Dean’s elbow.

“Not something I’m likely to forget,” Young Dean answered. He started to walk slowly in the opposite direction from their older selves, hands in the pockets of his jeans. “You’re not you. I gotta keep my hands to myself.”

Past-Cas looked confused for a moment before his expression cleared. “Oh,” he said. “Because of the vessel.”

“And I don’t know if it’s something you’d want even if there wasn’t a vessel in the way,” said Young Dean. “You’re still all new and heaven-bent. I shouldn’t think the things I do. Sorry for bringing it up on you.”

“I can feel your longing—”

“I’ll try to stop.”

“It’s like God’s favour.” Past-Cas’ steady gaze betrayed no sense that these words were different from any others. He only ever spoke truth, and as a consequence didn’t realize that not all truth had the same gravity. “It’s like what His favour was meant to be. A radiant hand extending suddenly through the dusk. Changing what it touches. Granting light with which to see through the gloom and behold the world as it truly is. I have not been imparted this benefaction before.”

“I’m not a saint, Cas,” said Young Dean. “Don’t make me sound so holy.”

“I am only saying what I sense,” said Past-Cas. “The imprint of your longing has left an irreversible mark on me. I could feel your soul through any darkness.”

Young Dean covered his mouth with a hand, stopping mid-stride and looking out blindly at the water. His heart would leave his chest if he wasn’t careful.

“Cas, will you come with me?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Past-Cas. “Where?”

“To a new world,” said Young Dean. “One where we remember all this.”

“Yes,” he said again.

At the picnic table further down the beach, Cas folded his arms and leaned a hip against the weathered wooden planks. “Build walls around it,” he repeated in a crisp voice. He eyed Dean meaningfully, which served as all the commentary needed on the matter.

“Hey, I did it for your sake,” said Dean. “You don’t need me knocking on your brain at all hours of the day. You deserve some peace.”

“We really were always hopeless, weren’t we?” Cas sighed.

“I’m not hopeless,” said Dean.

“Teen-Dean would likely say otherwise.”

“Look, I get that everyone thinks Teen-Dean is sweet and adorable, but he’s kind of a dick,” said Dean. “What’s he saying to you in your heart-to-hearts anyway?”

“He’s refreshingly open,” said Cas, and if he was a little snide and catty as he spoke, Dean couldn’t help liking him better for it. “But I’d hate to betray his confidence.”

“No you wouldn’t,” said Dean. “But whatever. What do you say to him?”

Cas flagrantly refused to answer, pressing his lips and looking out at the shoreline. Dean laughed, jostling him with an elbow. “What do you say?” he pressed. “Come on, Cas.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” Cas said at last, still not looking at Dean.

“What, you ragging on me?” said Dean.

“No,” said Cas. But they both knew Dean wouldn’t give him the option of not answering. He looked down at the sand, the chagrin clear in his face as he raised an eyebrow and replied, “I tell him how glad I am things have changed between us. I wanted it a long time.”

Dean studied Cas’ profile, looked away with a mild smile, then turned his attention back. “Wow. That’s terrible.”

Cas heaved another sigh, gaze turning skyward, blue eyes catching the light and turning clearer. “I go on,” he said. “And on and on.”

“Got something to get off your chest?”

“Maybe. And… He’s a very good listener. He wants to hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“That…” Cas finally looked directly at Dean. “He’s loved.”

Dean should’ve known it. Should’ve realised what he was setting Cas up to say. Every action between them spoke it, and had for years, but suddenly it had been given words and couldn’t be unsaid. He couldn’t speak or look away.

“It was very easy to tell him about it,” said Cas. “There wasn’t much to risk. But I need to say it to you. I love you, Dean.”

Dean wore that afflicted look, that mix of torment and upheaval. He’d been taught, like a monster, to constrict his own emotions, to blunt how those of others affected him. To cope by avoidance. Love was the most perilous feeling, the one that others could abuse.

Until recently, he could believe he’d effectively severed his own ability to love. Just another casualty in a long list of self-mutilations and sacrifices. He hadn’t had sufficient cause to believe it survived, but somehow this withered, half-lifeless thing, his heart, fluttered with new spirit. Pitiful and fledgling, but remarkable in its re-emergence. Not like a phoenix rising whole from the ashes: like a gull coming out of an oil slick.

“I don’t need you to answer to it,” said Cas. “I know it might upset you. I just need you to know.”

Silence was another habit. Or symptom, maybe. When things were too big. When he’d lost his mom as a kid. The times he lost Sam. Lost Cas. But this wasn’t a grief, this wasn’t a hardship. This wasn’t something he wanted to feel numb to.

“No,” he said. “I love you.”

Cas smiled. Beatifically wide, the single most gorgeous thing Dean knew.

If he could keep Cas that happy, he was doing something right in this world.

Cas’ smile lingered. He put a thumb to the furrow in Dean’s brow, as if to smooth it away. “Next time you should try that without the frown.”

“Oh he’s real funny,” Dean snarked, catching Cas’ arm to lower his hand away. “Went and found me the only angel with a sense of humour.” His hand slipped around Cas’ waist, under his coat, as they mutually moved closer. Dean’s head bowed, foreheads touching, a breath away from kissing Cas. The barest hint of a smile chased across his lips. “God help me,” he said, “but I love you.”  


* * *

  
For all the work Sam and Essie did, it was Young Dean who found the key to making it all work.

One of the Gnostic texts described a ritual for world-making, complete with instructions as to time and place and the words of power needed to enact the spell. Sam had formed a mind map on the table of texts and references around the central spell. The issue was the ‘sacred circle.’

“It’s like we’re missing pages,” said Sam, holding a book open in his hands and pacing. “It’s so specific about everything else. He has to be sitting under a grafted apple tree. It must begin at noon-tide when the veil is thin. And it keeps mentioning the ‘sacred circle,’ how the ‘sacred circle’ has to be _so exact_ , how every part of the spell reacts to the components of the ‘sacred circle.’ Here, again, it’s saying how we’ll ‘see the light rise from the sacred circle.’ But look.” He held up the book. “No circles! Anywhere!”

The others speculated and volleyed ideas, Essie trying to connect certain witch’s circles she’d seen with Greek traditions. Dean asking if there was anything sacred in demon traps. Past-Cas positing that all circles had a sacred perfection as representations of the infinite. All tenuous connections. Young Dean stayed out of it, sitting back in a chair and flipping through the big red book with _Seven Sermons to the Dead_ in it.

He only paused on the page with a full-colour image because it was a circle. Not because he thought it would lead anywhere. Some of the small pictograms inside the concentric circles were these dinky little figures, almost laughable, and the writing was all in Latin and a heavy script. What caught his attention was the picture at the top of the circle, a man inside an oval, with wings spreading out behind. He thought of angel wings, first. A sentimental notion. Him, the man, and Cas, the angel.

Then he thought of griffin wings, spread wide across the cave as it reared.

_The bird struggles out of the egg._

It wasn’t just an oval around the man. It was the griffin egg.

He dragged his hand down the page, fingertips pausing under the title text low on the left-hand side. “Systema munditotius.” ‘Mundi’ meant ‘world,’ he knew that much. _The egg is the world_. And there, in tiny writing at the bottom of the circle: “Abraxas dominus mundi.”

“Guys,” he said. “I mighta found something.”

“That’s dumb. We’re not doing that,” Dean said to Sam, rapidly shooting down another idea.

“You haven’t offered anything better.”

“Next thing you’ll say is we should all just join hands around them singing ‘Circle of Life.’ Or maybe just blow some soap bubbles and see if that does it.”

“Be serious, Dean,” said Sam.

“I think I found something,” Young Dean repeated, louder. It broke through the tension. Young Dean turned the Red Book out to show them the picture. “How’s this?”

Essie, closest to him, took the book when he offered it. She had an easier time with the Latin. “The System of all Worlds,” she said. “This was Jung’s first mandala.” She scanned over the surrounding text as she brought the book to a table where the rest could see. Young Dean unfolded from his chair to come closer as well.

“It’s an accompaniment to his _Seven Sermons_ ,” she said. “He claimed that the revelations came to him in visionary states of consciousness. That he was merely transcribing the visions shown to him by his spirit guide, Philemon.”

“That’s the egg,” said Sam, pointing at once to the image at the top of the mandala. “And that’s ‘eros’ below it. The spell mentions that.” His fingers dragged down to the image in the same place at the bottom of the mandala. “And there’s ‘vita,’ the Tree of Life. Dean, you’re a genius.”

“Thanks,” said the older Dean. Young Dean punched his arm for it.

“We willing to bet that’s our sacred circle?” said Young Dean.

“It looks likely,” said Sam, pulling his hand back from the page to drag thoughtfully over his mouth. “My only question is, how are we going to put _that_ together under an apple tree in the course of one morning? It has to be twelve feet across, and this picture is… What’s the word? Extremely complicated.”

Essie hummed. “We make it ahead and bring it with us,” she said, finding her answer as she spoke. “Not on paper, that will tear. But if we put it on a big enough sheet or a piece of cloth, that would fold neatly. I have a friend in town who does silk screening and batik.” She caught Young Dean’s stumped expression and added, “That’s painting on fabric. She would likely have the right cloth and paints on hand.”

Which was how, a few hours later, the whole group of them got to work in the living room, where there was space enough to lay out the fabric. They carefully dragged paint across the cloth in the different areas of the mandala. Castiel and Past-Cas had the best hand for drawing the figures with angelic precision, Essie filled in the text with a fabric marker, leaving Sam and the Deans to colour-by-numbers and try to stay within the lines.

“The more I think about it,” Sam said. “The more obvious it is that Past-Cas _has_ to go. Abrasax, or Abraxas, is all about duality. The balance of opposites. Differentiation _is_ creation. Past-Cas and Teen-Dean are the celestial and the terrestrial. The sacred and the profane.”

“Fuck you, who you calling profane?” Young Dean asked, looking up from his work at the centre of the mandala with a grin.

Sam laughed, pushing hair behind his ear and obliviously streaking blue paint through it. “The jackass I’m looking at, I guess,” he said. Young Dean laughed and went back to his work, while Sam still surveyed the mandala.

“But think about it, with the griffin and everything,” said Sam. “It was two animals in one form, that’s where the egg’s power comes from. And like, look at this part.” He pointed at ‘eros’ at the top of the mandala. “According to Jung, Eros’ form is flame. It devours. Opposite is the Tree of Life.” He pointed at the word ‘vita’ at the bottom, where Past-Cas worked carefully at painting out the image of a tree. “It’s living matter. The tree grows slowly, creating more leaves every year, always increasing in the life it creates. The flame, Eros, burns bright, but once used up it dies away.”

Dean sat back on his heels, taking his brush away from the outer perimeter of the mandala. “So kinda like a human and an angel, you’re saying.” His voice was cold and level, a pretense of neutrality.

Sam hadn’t seen what he was walking into. He looked over the mandala, probably trying to find an opening to lawyer his way out of the implication.

Dean spoke again before he could. “I’m gonna get a beer. Anyone else need a beer?” He pointed at Young Dean and Sam as he stood, answering his own question on their behalf.

Dean gave himself a minute of just looking in the fridge, then pulled a few bottles out of a six-pack. He opened the first and took a swallow. Cas came into the kitchen and leaned back against the fridge.

“We’re just mayflies to you,” said Dean.

“You’re much more than that, Dean,” said Cas. “You know it.”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. About what happens to you, when I go.” He drummed his fingertips against the countertop. “I think I had this idea. That in a perfect world, we’d go out on the same hunter’s pyre.” He gave a bitter laugh. “How’s that for romance? But I don’t want you dead. Just because I have to go doesn’t mean you do.”

“You’ll go to Heaven, Dean,” said Cas.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I won’t let you go to Hell again,” said Cas.

“And you?” said Dean.

“When you’re not on this Earth, I don’t see why I’d stay,” said Cas. “You’re the reason I’m here. And the only thing that would make me return to Heaven is you.”

“I don’t know if I’m crazy about Heaven. Just stuck in some old room reliving the greatest hits?”

“I agree it could do with some reforms.”

“Right. Because if I can’t leave, explain to me how it’s not a prison,” said Dean. “Shit, we don’t have it in us to quit, do we? I always said I’d go out swinging, but I got a feeling that even being dead won’t stop me fighting.”

“Heaven could use some shaking up,” said Cas. He paused a moment, thinking out his words before speaking. “Sometimes I wonder…” he said. He lifted one hand, the one he used to heal and smite, twisting it and looking at it curiously. “My grace is fading. Is it the waning of Heaven’s power, or is it only me? What will I be once it’s gone? Human, like you?” He looked across at Dean again. “Maybe even the Tree of Life has to die one day. And maybe it wouldn’t mind.”

Dean’s eyes caught the sunlight, clear and green and guileless. “Not a day before me,” he said. “Not a day after.”

“Same hunter’s pyre,” said Cas.

Dean nodded. He lifted his beer for a sip, asking first, “We always been this morbid?”

Cas shrugged. “It’s been a bit of a constant,” he said. “I did make you crawl out of your coffin the day we met.”

“Hey, yeah, what was with that?” said Dean. “That was not _easy_. I almost died a second time.”

“It was where your body was,” said Cas. “I simply brought you back there. I didn’t have a mind for details regarding basic human limitations. I fulfilled the letter of the mission, and didn’t think about the part where you had to dig through six feet of earth.”

Dean granted him a surly look and Cas rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t have done it _now_ ,” he said.

Dean shook his head. “Man, you’re lucky you’re…”

“Lucky I’m what?” said Cas.

“Lot of things,” said Dean. “Come on, grab those beers. Let’s get the art project done with. Man, I hate group assignments.”

Young Dean looked up from his painting when Dean reentered the living room. There was a question in his eyes, but he didn’t ask. Maybe he figured he didn’t need to. The kid was so certain that this egg-fix would be the answer to everything, that it would herald the end of suffering. Dean didn’t know about that. This new world would still be full of landmines and pitfalls. Foresight would only take him so far when every small decision might radically alter the world. Even this love he had for Cas, this thing he was so certain of, would find new ways to snarl and tangle over life’s inevitable complications. There’d be fights and misunderstandings: they were too good at those to avoid them entirely.

But the crux was, he wouldn’t be alone. It was never something he’d been good at, never more than a front anyone who really knew him could see through. Young Dean would start over, just ahead of twenty, with someone who knew him deeper and loved him harder than anything he could conceive of. He’d start out with something that Dean had only just won for himself, more than twenty years later.

He couldn’t predict what was ahead for Young Dean. Because he couldn’t predict what was ahead for himself. He had no idea of whether this would change him and who he’d become. All he had was the fresh certainty that the worst was behind.

Maybe he could understand Young Dean’s optimism after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> » you might be saying to yourself, how many anguished declarations of love should you put in one story? allow me to let you in on a little secret: the limit does not exist  
> » this whole plot comes from a place of being a longtime Abraxas fan, and then having him appear on _Supernatural_ as an unlikeable one-use-only demon. (I also had a longstanding fondness for Belphegor that predated S15, but he showed up with real panache so I wasn’t mad about it)  
> » for those who would like to see it, here is the “[Systema Munditotius](http://www.gnosis.org/images/Jung-First-Mandela_big.jpg)” mandala  
> » ch. 8 title reference: _The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit_. because we are lost in the Gnostic sauce.


End file.
